Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott has captured the attention of fans and critics alike, due in no small part to the way it breaks apart the classic novel before reassembling it in new and interesting ways. For example, instead of following a linear plot (as the book does) the film jumps back and forth in the lives of the four March sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy - as they grow up in Civil War-era New England.
Louisa May Alcott herself grew up Massachusetts in the years leading up the the war, and many of the plot points of Little Women track closely with details from Alcott’s life. The March family is from Concord; Alcott was raised in Concord. The March family is socially liberal and values the arts; Alcott’s family was part of the Transcendentalist movement, keeping famous friends like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The March family is abolitionist; Alcott’s family were station masters in the Underground Railroad. The similarities go on and on.
When Alcott wrote Little Women, she wrote from her own experience, which is part of the reason these characters resonate with readers then and now. Gerwig’s love for her source material is obvious in her restructuring of Little Women. She explicitly weaves together Louisa May Alcott and Jo March’s lives, creating an extra layer that comes together brilliantly in the last few scenes.
Little Women 2019 Adds A Meta Narrative
The film opens with Jo unsuccessfully attempting a negotiation. A stodgy New York City publisher named Mr. Dashwood, played with dry humor by Pultizer Prize winner Tracy Letts, reads her short story, crossing out whole pages and huffing with exasperation before offering her a lump sum of cash. Jo accepts, happy for the money but unsure of her work and of herself. By the end of the film, Jo is back in the same office negotiating once more, but she has gained a confidence and savvy she lacked in the beginning. Her new work, a personal novel called Little Women, is good and she knows it. She refuses to give up copyright, and manages to negotiate a higher percentage of the book sales.
This serves one of Gerwig’s overarching themes - the relationship between women, money, and independence. Economic freedom is something all of the March girls want in their own way, and they all find it through some sort of sacrifice. For Amy, it means making an advantageous marriage regardless of love, and for Meg, it’s adjusting her expectations so that she can be happy with what she has. For Jo, a writer through and through, the compromise is artistic. Mr. Dashwood does ultimately relent to Jo’s terms, but only if she agrees to go ahead and have the main character get married.
Gerwig cuts between this negotiation in Mr. Dashwood’s office, and the canonical story of Little Women that viewers have watched unfold over the course of the film. As character Jo dashes through the rain to catch Prof. Bhaer and confess her love, writer Jo is simultaneously agreeing to write that sort of big romantic moment. By cutting these scenes together and creating a meta-narrative, Gerwig implies that Jo’s love for Bhaer and their subsequent engagement is less of a romantic victory, and more of an economic one; the emotional climax of the film lives not in romance, but in Jo owning her own story.
How Little Women 2019’s Ending Is Different
In the last moments of the film, Gerwig continues to cut between the book narrative - a joyous family celebration at Jo’s school–and the meta-narrative, where Saoirse Ronan’s Jo looks on as the printer painstakingly binds her first book. However, this was not a moment experienced by Jo in Little Women the novel, but by Alcott in real life, who made a similar bargain with her publisher to marry off Jo March while remaining a spinster herself. The meta-narrative doesn’t exist at all in the original novel. Although Jo does begin to write more personal stories, she did not write a full length, personal novel by the end of Alcott’s book. Instead, it was Alcott who got to see her book come into the world and become and instant success, and Ronan captures a young author’s excitement, triumph, and anticipation perfectly in the last shot of the film, blurring the line between Jo March and Louisa May Alcott even further.
This big change - the addition of a meta-narrative - sets Gerwig’s film apart from all other Little Women adaptations, and is definitely a major departure from the book, which is a classically linear story. These changes are extremely effective in communicating some of the major themes of women’s authorship and independence that were as important to Alcott then as they are to Gerwig now. They also open up ambiguity that can lead to some interesting debate. Was the meta-narrative Jo, sitting in the publisher’s office, just making up the scene where she gets married to Bhaer to appease Mr. Dashwood? Did it never actually happen? Or is Gerwig keeping the plot elements the same (Jo and Bhaer get engaged, Jo successfully opens her school, etc.) but also just adding the meta-narrative to undercut those events thematically? Gerwig leaves it up the viewer, and this will no doubt be a question on the minds of Little Women fans as they situate Gerwig’s adaptation into the long history of Alcott’s story on screen.
Why Little Women 2019’s Ending Is So Good
The final moments of the film manage to capture the spirit of Louisa May Alcott’s work and life, even as they subtly subvert the canon of the more straightforward book. Even though Alcott had to wrap up her novel with a tidy romance, she was nonetheless a transgressive and independent woman in her day. That ethos shines through in Little Women, and Gerwig makes sure to bring it to the surface and give it center stage. Perhaps that is why Gerwig’s film feels so vital and fresh - because Jo, Alcott, and Gerwig all know what it is to be a woman writing her own story, and how important it is to know that story’s worth.
Speaking on the Director’s Guild of America’s Podcast, Gerwig said
Gerwig has absolutely accomplished her goal by making the big change of adding a meta-narrative to the closing scenes of the book, creating a Little Women that has important things to say to a new generation of viewers.
“Part of what I wanted to do was 150 years later give [Louisa May Alcott] an ending she might have liked. I thought if we can’t do this now then we’ve really made no progress and we should all hang our heads (laughs). But the structure truly came out of wanting to introduce this layer of authorship everywhere in it, how we author our own lives even if we’re not writers and how we kind of tell and retell the story of how we became who we are.”
Next: Little Women: Every Adaptation Ranked (Including The 2019 Movie)
- Little Women Release Date: 2019-12-25
