Like Jo, you have to fight hard for recognition.
Gerwig knows it, just as any woman who writes novels, or makes art or directs films knows it. Women’s stories continue to be written off, to be denied the status of high art. (Because, while women are constantly required to imagine themselves from the viewpoint of a male character, men are rarely expected to surrender the default, and even when they are encouraged to do so will often be resistant.) We have writers such as Elena Ferrante to thank for this ever-increasing acceptance, though we must remember those who dispiritingly insisted that this anonymous author of world-class skill must be a man masquerading as a woman. We have come some way to reconciling the domestic when it comes to artistic and literary output, of accepting that stories in such a setting are human stories worthy of being told, even if the protagonists are female. “Maybe,” says her sister Amy, “We don’t see these things as important because people don’t write about them.” “Who will be interested in a story of domestic struggles and joys? It doesn’t have any real importance.” “It’s just about our little life,” says Jo, of the new writing she is producing. This is why I sense that Gerwig may have anticipated the snub, and may even have baked its underpinnings into the text of the film. Furthermore, Little Women gets to the heart of which stories continue to be perceived as important and worthy of intellectual inquiry and interpretation. Gerwig’s partner, Noah Baumbach, is also a director, and although their work together has involved collaboration and Baumbach has been vocal about her influence on his work, she has been consistently cast as his muse. Perhaps it is Gerwig’s affinity with the March sisters, via the struggle to be a woman artist, that makes her adaptation of Little Women so good. Gerwig blended the two narratives to create a sort of meta-fiction, gifting Alcott’s heroine the ending that she – and perhaps Alcott – were both prevented from writing (in the film, Jo is told by her publisher, in a guise that could equally be that of a Hollywood mogul, that “if the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end”). In real life, Alcott became a famous author, writing later of her heroine Jo that “she should have become a literary spinster”. Alcott’s novel ends with Jo, having got married and become a mother, giving up writing and founding a school. Look away if you don’t want spoilers, but Gerwig gives Jo a book. Nor was she shortlisted for best screenplay, despite having intelligently rewritten the story as a non-chronological dual narrative that switches between the sisters’ girlhoods and womanhoods, before she introduces a third narrative strain that erodes the boundaries between fact and fiction while commenting shrewdly on itself. She was not nominated for a Golden Globe in the best director category, which this year, yet again, features only men. It is ironic, then, that despite having produced one of the best films of the year, Gerwig has been snubbed for her efforts, dismaying many film critics. I’d allowed it to become this snowglobe of sweetness, and it was nothing like that. “I couldn’t believe how modern it was, how strange it was, how spiky it was. “When I read it at 30 I couldn’t believe it, I felt like I’d never read it before,” Gerwig told the New Yorker. Furthermore, it serves as a timely reminder of just how feminist the original novel, published in two parts in 18, was. The rave reviews are pouring in, and to the universal acclaim I can add my own: this clever, spirited, witty adaptation is pure pleasure from start to finish. Having just seen the new film, starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen as the sisters Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth March, I assured her there was nothing to worry about. In her family of women, the 1994 film starring Winona Ryder is a Christmas tradition another version will, she fears, inevitably disappoint. M y sister-in-law confesses that she is nervous about the Greta Gerwig adaptation of Little Women, in cinemas from Boxing Day.
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