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Michigan State
University

This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

"WE HAVE FATHER AND MOTHER AND EACH OTHER":
LITTLE WOMEN AND THE AMERICAN NUCLEAR FAMILY
ROMANCE, 1868-1994

 

presented by
Mary Hughes

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for

 

 

Ph.D. degree in American Studies

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“WE HAVE FATHER AND MOTHER AND EACH OTHER”: LITTLE WOMEN
AND THE AMERICAN NUCLEAR FAMILY ROMANCE, 1868 — 1994

BY

Mary Hughes

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements

for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

American Studies Program

2001

ABSTRACT

“WE HAVE FATHER AND MOTHER AND EACH OTHER”: LITTLE WOMEN
AND THE AMERICAN NUCLEAR FAMILY ROMANCE, 1868 - 1994

By

Mary Hughes

People acquire values, attitudes, and beliefs from a number of sources,
including families, schools, and churches. One set of values, attitudes, and
beliefs concerns the notion of the nuclear family as it is understood in the United
States; and this set of ideas is perpetuated as much in the popular media as it is
through other, more traditional institutions. As was the case in other industrialized
countries, notions about nuclear family in the US developed in tandem with
industrialization (primarily in the nineteenth century in the US) in major urban
areas. The middle-class deﬁnition of family wherein the father/husband went out
to work and the mother/wife managed the private home became the ruling
paradigm, one which continues to exert its inﬂuence into the present day, even
though most families do not ﬁt the paradigm. This study examines how the
nineteenth-century ideology of the nuclear family is reproduced by way of popular
media, speciﬁcally Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women and three of its later
ﬁlm adaptations (1933, 1949, and 1994). For more than 133 years, the story and
its adaptations have reproduced nuclear family ideology, and the ideology

remains virtually unchanged despite substantial social change over time.

Copyright by
MARY HUGHES
2001

To Bruce and Christa, who never stopped believing in me, thank you.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing a dissertation is a taxing enterprise under the best of
circumstances, and it is even more difﬁcult when the writing is done from afar, in
my case, Alabama and then Mississippi, both rather distant from Michigan State
University. Despite the difﬁculties, many people worked with me. I want to thank
my dissertation director, Dean Rehberger, and my other committee members -
Maureen Flanagan, Barry Gross, and David Cooper — for their comments and
support. I also wish to thank Gary Hoppenstand who took the time to serve as my
outside reader. I owe thanks, as well, to Steve Rachman, Director of the
American Studies Program.

Finally, I want to thank my writing group whose example helped keep me
on task and all the support staff in the American Studies Program for their help

while I emailed and wrote letters from other states.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1

CHAPTER 1

LITTLE WOMEN THEN ...................................................................................... 12

CHAPTER 2

UNTO THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION ............................................. 39

CHAPTER 3

ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH .................................................................... 68

CHAPTER 4

BEYOND FEMINISM: LITTLE WOMEN IN THE POSTMODERNISM IDIOM ..... 94

CHAPTER 5

WHAT IT ALL COMES TO ................................................................................ 122

WORKS CITED ................................................................................................. 137
General References .................................................................................... 142

vi

INTRODUCTION

Every generation in a culture acquires its values, attitudes, and beliefs
from a number of sources. The most commonly discussed mechanisms are the
family and the school, both of which are aided (and sometimes obstructed) by the
media in their many guises. This study is an examination of one way that a
particular ideology has been transmitted from one era to later ones, even though
much of that ideology has become culturally “dysfunctional.” The notion of the
nuclear family — two heterosexual parents and their children living in their private
home and supported by the wage-earning father — developed in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries as a concomitant to industrialization and the emergence
of a capitalist class, ﬁrst in Europe and then later in the United States.
Households in the middle class had the ﬁnancial freedom to spare wives and
children from wage labor outside the home, and home was transformed from a
locus of production to a haven from the stresses of the outside world. The
definition of family noted above depends upon this separation of the home from
the world of work and the ensuing privatization of the home and family. Martine
Segalen’s discussion of the changes in family structure resulting from
industrialization comments on attitudinal positioning in the middle and upper
classes. She notes that the upper classes were concerned about their social
position, particularly in their ability to distinguish themselves from wage laborers
and their families: “The family lay at the heart of the bourgeois pattern and was

defined as the place of order, the conveyor of a powerful normative model, every

discrepancy from which was considered a dangerous form of social deviance”
(392). Wage laborers were most likely to deviate from this model, and reform
efforts regularly focused on eliminating this deviance. The term “friendly visiting"
was applied to some approaches to this reform effort. One such “visitor”
declared:
No one who knows anything of tenement-house life can wonder at
the inability of those who share it to cope with the emergencies of
life. The ﬁrst necessity of human endeavor - a true home - simply
does not exist. There is no room in a tenement apartment for the
expansion of love, for the growth of sympathy; there is none for the
practice of the common arts of life. Gregarious to the limit of
existence, these people are essentially solitary; they have no
community of interest with their neighbors, and therefore no
realization of the solidarity of society. (Horton 478)
The undeclared content here is that “these people” lack the accoutrements of
middle-class life because an apartment doesn’t qualify as a home, not to mention
that a “true home” demands the full-time presence of a mother and the full-time
employment of the father, neither of which were typical of tenement life.1

The notion of the nuclear family represents a combination of cultural

 

‘ Horton’s answer was to enroll these children in kindergartens which would supply the
deﬁciencies of their home lives. Kindergarten meant three years of schooling which would result
in “an awakened intelligence [. . .] a delight in duty [. . .] a stability of character [. . .] a warmth of
heart which will keep him true to his family and social pieties; a sense of obligation which will
make him a conscientious citizen” (478).“

An earlier means of solving this kind of problem had been implemented by the Children’s Aid
Society of New York whose purpose according to founder, Charles Brace, was to remove “as
many poor children as possible from the ‘contaminating inﬂuence' of their families to ‘good
Christian homes' in the Midwest” (qtd. in Gish 121).

‘givens’ that, since its popular codiﬁcation, has continued to impose the values of
a minority, the middle class, on a culture that cannot provide the economic
means for all of its households to subscribe to those values. In order to maintain
a ”traditional nuclear family,” a household must meet income levels that the
majority of the population cannot achieve. For many others, a middle-class
lifestyle can be achieved only if both parents work. Although Americans in
general are now more accepting of women working outside the home, some
stigma still attaches to women (and the households they belong to) when Mother
goes out to work. This division of labor into male/outside labor force and
female/home labor was fully codiﬁed (if not fully implemented) by the nineteenth
century, and its representation in Little Women has come to be one of the
deﬁnitive statements about appropriate family organization and management —
and this despite the fact that the book features women working outside the home
and virtually no male involvement in the household.

A key component of the deﬁnition of the nuclear family is its designation
as belonging to the middle class. When Alcott wrote Little Women, the idea of a
middle class was only beginning to develop in the United States. During the
eighteenth century, there were people classiﬁed as the “middling sorts” who were
neither rich nor poor; they were not considered members of a class. Rather they
were identiﬁed as persons who were reasonably successful at supporting
themselves and their families, usually by means of their own physical labor, but
who were not likely to become wealthy. Stuart Blumin discusses the social

changes that accrued to the development of new modes of production in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, noting that a distinction arose between
those who labored with their hands and those who managed to acquire capital
and then pay those who labored with their hands. These entrepreneurs at the
lower end of the economic scale who now worked with their heads and their
capital began to distinguish themselves from the manual laborers who worked for
them; working with one’s head became a symbol of one’s elevated status over
those who could “only” work with their hands. Another element in the
development of an identiﬁable middle class was consumption, an activity that
was defined as woman’s work. Women who no longer spun thread and wove
cloth or otherwise contributed to the family economy became household
purchasing agents and they used their purchasing power to help clarify their new
class position. As Blumin notes: “Events on the other side of the retail sales
counter, and in the “separate sphere’ of domestic womanhood, were inﬂuential,
perhaps even crucial, in generating new social identities. To this extent, middle-
class formation was woman’s work” (191). The other side of the counter was
where the middle-class woman made her purchasing decisions, thereby
establishing which products fulﬁlled middle-class needs. However, income was
not the sole determinant of middle-class identity. The kind of work one did was
equally important.

The idea of working with one’s head opened the way for “the class of
merchants, clerks, and ministers. . . to think differently about themselves and
their families,” something that had happened as early as the seventeenth century

in Europe (Baritz xi). This was accomplished in part because of their ability to

earn a living without resorting to physical labor. It was also accomplished in part
by their aligning themselves with a set of attitudes and ideals espoused by this
middle group. These were “certain common values, such as individualism,
industry, domesticity, and piety. It is through the influence of these values that
are more or less shared by its members, rather than through action, that the
middle class achieves moral dominance in Victorian culture” (Young 3). To the
extent that class is a matter of perception, personal or social, anyone who
subscribed to these ideals and could maintain a private home could and, usually
would, be considered a part of the middle class. Thus by the mid-nineteenth
century, a genteelly poor family like the Marches could retain their middle-class
status even while the women of the household were forced into the world of
work.

Because it has been adapted more often than virtually any other piece of
sentimental/domestic literature, Little Women has carried nineteenth-century
notions through the twentieth century and into the early twenty-ﬁrst century. The
story has been produced as a play, an opera, in comic and cartoon forms, in
abbreviated novel form for younger readers, as a television series, and in several
ﬁlm versions. This study examines three of the full-length ﬁlm versions. Film
versions of this story have retold the tale, clearly modiﬁed by and for their own
cultural contexts. However, to remain relatively ”accurate” as adaptations, they
must retain enough particulars of the original to make the story recognizable to
their audiences. So even though later audiences lack the nineteenth-century

context of the original, something of that era is still represented to later

audiences. As James Monaco notes, “Film does not suggest . . . it states” (159),
and in this case the statement includes the values and beliefs Alcott wrote into
her work, albeit modiﬁed by adaptation. As a result, the ﬁlms serve as
transmission mechanisms for the reproduction of nineteenth-century values in
later periods. The various interpretations reveal much about the particular times
when they were produced; they also reveal the degree to which much of the
ideology in the original has been transmitted virtually intact for more than 130
years. Regardless of the speciﬁc effects achieved by various adaptations, at
least some of the themes from the original ﬁnd their way to the screen and then
to the audience, whether the ﬁlm achieves true ﬁdelity with the novel or not. In
determining the success of a ﬁlm adapted from a novel, Brian McFarlane
suggests that critics consider “just what it is possible to transfer or adapt from the
novel” as well as “what key factors other than the source novel have exercised
inﬂuence on the ﬁlm version” (22 emphasis in original). A story like Little Women
is easily mined for scenarios and vignettes transferable to ﬁlm; these scenarios
and vignettes become the speciﬁc transmission mechanisms both for ideas from
the original and for ideas inserted by the adapters.

In order to understand the ﬁlm adaptations, it is necessary to know the
original story. Thus, chapter 1 is a discussion of the novel itself, placed in its
original context. It is set during the Civil War, although it was actually written four
years after the war’s conclusion; there is only passing reference to war, though.
Instead, the focus is deﬁnitively domestic. All of the issues addressed in the

novel are related to concerns about the home circle, some directly and some

indirectly. The importance of the private home is established early in the text. It
is a place of instruction, both moral and practical, and of protection from
undesirable inﬂuences. That it is peopled exclusively by women through most of
the ﬁrst part of the novel reinforces the idea that the home space is the
appropriate sphere for womanly activity. That Marmee looks to the absent
Father for guidance in guiding her daughters (as well as for guidance for herself)
establishes that patriarchy, which relies on a nuclear family model, is a part of the
social matrix Alcott explores. Immigration is addressed by way of the March’s
charity work for the immigrant Hummels, the uncouth Irish children who taunt the
girls at Amy’s school, and the German immigrant professor whom Jo eventually
marries. Only the class-appropriate professor ever sees the inside of the March
home. The urban/rural divide is alluded to indirectly. The March home is in the
suburbs where the girls can spend plenty of time outdoors, free of the grime and
crassness of the city. Although the Marches don’t live on a farm, they do keep
chickens and a garden, both practical and wholesome activities not easily
managed in a full-ﬂedged city.

Other issues arise at various times throughout the novel, some of which
later ﬁnd their way into the ﬁlms. Speciﬁc incidents or ideas that show up in the
films will be addressed in the corresponding chapters. Otherwise, the analysis of
the text will be conﬁned to chapter 1 and the points listed above. Criticism of the
novel as well as scholarship on Alcott informs this section.

The novel, written in the episodic style common to illustrated newspaper

serials of the era, offers a self-contained vignette in each chapter. The chapters

in the ﬁrst part of the novel are named (analogously) after the chapters in Paul
Bunyan’s P_ilgrim’s Progress. and they, just as the chapters in Bunyan’s work,
each contain some part of the moral lesson that inheres in the novel.
Additionally, most of the episodes do not rely on a speciﬁc chronology in order to
make sense. This structure is the novel’s most important characteristic in terms
of its easy replication in other forms and other eras.

The discrete episodes within the novel also contribute to its particularly
protean character. Because it is not dependent on a linear time frame, and
because adapters can choose whichever episodes they wish, they are also free
to focus the story any way they wish by simply selecting the material that will
work best with their speciﬁc approaches. Chapter 2 examines this protean
character in the 1933 ﬁlm version. Although the ﬁlm depicts competent women
managing their own lives and earning their own keep, it manages to retain much
of its domestic/sentimental focus. The women face the hard times of a war
economy without the breadwinner, and they rise to the occasion by ﬁnding
suitable means for supporting themselves. At the same time, the women retain
their faith in the value of a family with Father as its head and Marmee as its
heart. Women working to support their households was a growing reality in the
Depression year of 1933, and the ﬁlm presented this necessity as a virtue at the
same time that it depicted the women as being in full accord with the patriarchal
ideology that kept the man “in charge” of the home regardless of who supported
it ﬁnancially. The ﬁlm combines images of feminine power with reassurances

about the sanctity — and achievability — of the private, middle-class, nuclear

family home. Thus, each of the surviving March girls ﬁnishes the ﬁlm
appropriately married (or engaged to be married) and eager to replicate her
happy childhood home in a similarly organized home of her own.

Chapter 3 expands on the episodic nature of the novel and the way that
the vignettes, particularly when translated into later adaptations, serve as tropes
— tropes for family, for home, for femininity, for moral character. These tropes,
these common sense notions, contribute to the sense that the depiction is
somehow correct, socially, morally, even sometimes personally. Some of these
tropes are that a good home is a comfortable, middle-class home; that women
can not be friends with the men they love (Amy notwithstanding; she was not
really old enough to be friends with Laurie the way that the other girls could); that
serious decisions and serious situations require the involvement of male
judgment or guidance; that mothers can claim any good moral decisions their
children make as their own.

Although the 1949 version used most of the 1933 screenplay, the changes
revealed substantial shifts in attitude from sixteen years earlier, particularly as
regards women and their independence, their proper sphere of activity, their
social power. Despite the fact that this ﬁlm was a virtual clone of the earlier one,
much of its feminist vision has been replaced by the cultural need for the wives
and mothers to be at home, making the message in this version more like that in
much of the novel. Women who had been managing their own lives, and earning
their own keep, were being encouraged, and sometimes forced, to turn over their

public roles and their jobs to the returning soldiers. So long as their work had

been necessary for the war effort, women were welcome in the work force. Once
the soldiers came home, they were expected to step out of the way and assume
household duties — much the same situation that faced nineteenth-century
women at the end of the Civil War. The post-war sensibilities of the US made
nineteenth-century ideology right at home in the mid-twentieth century.

Chapter 4 is concerned with the 1994 ﬁlm of Little Women. The
screenplay for this version does not draw directly on either of the earlier ﬁlms. It
mixes incidents from the novel with incidents recorded in Alcott’s journals, and it
incorporates scholarship on Alcott’s work. In its celebration of women and what
they can do, it appears to be a more fully feminist version of the story than even
the1933 film. However, its ultimate message is one that re-places women in the
home, a move that brings nineteenth-century ideology forward to the end of the
twentieth century. It does seem to fairly represent Alcott’s domestic feminism,
and this is precisely the reason that it serves so well as a transmission
mechanism for nineteenth-century ideas. The kind of strong women the film
depicts are strong women who find their way to their appointed place in the
home, reinforcing the notion of separate spheres for a culture that, generally, can
not afford the separation. The tropes are here in full force: tropes for family, for
home, for femininity, for moral character. Despite its valiant attempt to bring a
realistic depiction of nineteenth-century home life to the screen, the ﬁlm manages
to conﬂate late twentieth-century feminism with Alcott’s domestic (or sentimental)
feminism. Marmee makes a few bra—buming speeches, supported by a valley girl

Jo (and shushed by a too-proper Meg), but the net message is still that “his”

10

empty hand is best ﬁlled by “hers”. In the end, this version of the story promises
the same idyllic family life that the novel depicts, a life that depends on women at
home (where they belong) guided by the (right) men in their lives.

It is my contention that the case studies of these particular ﬁlm versions, in
comparison with the novel, create a sort of roadmap for the transmission of
nineteenth-century notions into the twentieth century. Along the way, the ideas
stretch and bend, but they retain — or regain — their original senses as if they had
a life of their own. Perhaps, as ideas, they do. Certainly, varying interpretations
of the messages in Little Women manage to promote an ideal of home and family
that is at odds with modern experience. That private, nuclear family sanctuary
where mother is inﬁnitely patient and father is inﬁnitely wise and the outside
world stays outside where it belongs is long past resuscitation - assuming that it
ever existed on any sort of scale. The boundaries of the ersatz private family
home are even more permeable today than they were in the nineteenth century,
and fewer and fewer households live on the “family wage” supplied by the
husband/father. While the idea of a “traditional nuclear family" may be
comforting on one level, it fails as a practical ideology in an age of multiplicity. Its
values are commendable and should be salvaged; its formulaic application needs
adjustment. However, so long as adaptations are made of “old" material, the
“new” patches of interpretation will continue to pull away from the fabric, bringing

bits of the old forward with it.

11

Chapter 1

Little Women Then

Sentimental/domestic literature of the nineteenth century inscribed a
woman’s realm whose heart pulsed around her husband and her children (as
well as non-family members remanded to her maternal care, whether living in the
household or objects of charity). In this realm, affection reigned supreme. What
mattered most was not how one thought or how wealthy one was but how one
Leg; and feeling, the ability to have sensitive reactions to other human beings,
was defined in terms of goodness. However, this sentimentalism was not mere
mawkishness: ”Sentimentalism as construed by American women in the
nineteenth century, [Joanne Dobson] would suggest, is a complex imaginative
phenomenon comprised, yes, of feeling, but of feeling constellating around and
valorizing a distinctive set of emotional priorities and a speciﬁc moral vision”

(1 70).

Little Women supports Dobson’s suggestion that sentiment for nineteenth-
century women writers was feeling of a controlled, even rational sort. As with
other sentimental novels, its emotional priorities revolve around the home and
the woman’s role as moral guide for her family; this woman’s role is perceived to
be important to the individual home and to the larger community. In the larger
culture, as historian Jan Lewis notes, “[a]lthough a mother’s work was performed
at home, in private, it had enormous public importance; it was, fundamentally, of

a political and religious nature, for it aimed at preparing children for entry into a

12

particular society” (56). While that society - nineteenth-century, United States,
middle-class — is generally characterized as a world of separate spheres, what
women wrote about in that society indicates that they saw themselves as active
participants in the life of the republic, even if it was from their parlors.

Sentimental ﬁction implies a particular kind of moral sensitivity both on the
part of the writer and of the reader. Such works were meant to be edifying as well
as entertaining. Most sentimental ﬁction of the mid-nineteenth century was
written by women, and much of that was centered on home and hearth. Thus the
term “domestic ﬁction” came to describe a kind of ﬁction that combined the
moralizing of the sentimental with the pragmatic realties of domestic life.

Little Women is one of these domestic novels; it is solidly planted within
the March home, and within the world of the novel, the primary goal is the
development of good women from young girls who need to learn how to manage
their own domestic spaces. As a piece of writing meant for public consumption,
the book fulﬁlls the social expectation that writing for young ladies should impart
lessons for life, both moral and social, since “in the 1850’s . . . critics still believed
that Iiterature’s main purpose was to be edifying” (Tompkins 120), a notion that
continued to inform the practice of novel writing into the later nineteenth century.
Ultimately, the intent, implicit and explicit, is the reproduction of a particular social
arrangement involving the private home, a wage-earning father, and a morally
suitable mother. The surface story is simple and direct, a series of vignettes
describing the lives of four young women and their eventual development into

good adult women. The surface trappings are typical for the genre: middle-class

13

family (albeit in reduced circumstances), comfortable, if not luxurious home,
congenial family relationships. In the novel, the girls do, indeed, learn how to be
proper young women who will eventually run good, Christian homes of their own.
Elaine Showalter describes this genre of story as “[elssentially moralistic . . .
designed to bridge the gap between the schoolroom and the drawing room, to
recommend docility, marriage, and obedience rather than autonomy or
adventure” (50), and this is an apt characterization of Little Women, with the
possible exception of the obedience over autonomy part. For example, feminist
critic Madelon Bedell considers the idea of female autonomy a key focus of the
text, stating that “Little Women is not about ‘being good,” nor even about growing
up, but about the complexities of female power and the struggle to maintain it in a
male-dominated society” (147). However, there is much more emphasis
throughout the text on cooperation than there is on struggle. Throughout the
novel, ideas about companionate marriage and male/female cooperation
predominate. Although she never fully cedes the home realm to male dominance
as such, Alcott does describe a family structure recognizable as typical of
nineteenth-century, middle—class patriarchal notions of the family. Within that
framework, she depicts powerful women who amicably compromise with the men
in their lives—in other words, she depicts the mutuality of purpose that men and
women were supposed to exhibit in their family relations, in companionate
marriages.

The main characters in the novel are Marmee, the mother of the little

women; Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, eldest to youngest of the girls; Laurie

14

(Theodore Laurence), son of wealthy Mr. Laurence who lives next door to the
Marches; Aunt March, sister of the girls’ father; Mr. Brooke, Meg’s love interest
and later husband; and Professor Friedrich Bhaer, the German immigrant whom
Jo eventually marries. For the ﬁrst twenty-one chapters of the book, Father is
away at war and exercises paternal authority by way of the letters he sends.
Once he comes home, he is most often encountered indirectly, sitting in his
pastor’s study or as part of a scene where the family is gathered. The story
follows each of the girls as they grow into adult women; all of them marry, except
Beth who dies near the middle of the book.

The novel opens with the girls grumbling about not having any presents
for Christmas, a letter from Father admonishing them to be good, and the gift of
their Christmas breakfast to the poor Hummels. The girls then make the
acquaintance of Laurie, the orphaned grandson of their wealthy neighbor, Mr.
Laurence. Other key incidents in the novel include Mr. Laurence’s gift of a piano
to Beth, Marmee’s trip to Washington to nurse Father, Meg’s wedding to John
Brooke, the publication of Jo’s ﬁrst novel, Amy’s trip to Europe, Jo’s sojourn in
New York, Beth’s death, Amy’s marriage to Laurie, Jo’s engagement to Professor
Bhaer, Aunt March’s death and bequest of her home, Plumfield, to Jo. The novel
ends in rather a rush in the last chapter with Jo and the Professor marrying,
opening a boarding school for boys, and having two sons of their own. The last
scene in the book is of all the March sisters and their families gathered at

Plumﬁeld to harvest apples with the boys from the school.

15

Throughout the novel, Alcott combines ideas about proper behavior with
ideas that stretch the boundaries of propriety, most radically in the way Jo and
Friedrich many and then open a boarding school where they take in what one
philanthropist of the nineteenth century termed “waifs and strays” (Brace qtd. in
Gish 121 ). Jo and her professor display most ideally the kind of marital mutuality
of purpose that Alcott weaves throughout the story. This mutuality of purpose,
despite its apparently radical reworking of a patriarchal approach to marriage, is
a good ﬁt with the notion of separate spheres. Advice manuals of the mid-
nineteenth century laid out family responsibilities in neat categories. As the
caption to an illustration from Samuel Goodrich's Fireside Education put it, “The
mother sways the dominion of the heart, the father that of the lntellect” (qtd. in
Frank 40). Compare this to Alcott’s own words: “The girls gave their hearts into
their mother’s keeping—their souls into their father’s” (232). (All citations from the
novel are taken from the Modern Library edition.) The mother’s sway over the
heart was predicated on her innate love for her children and their inevitable
response to this exemplary love (Lewis 58), and from this reciprocal love a
mother acquired her authority over her children. This was the kind of authority
that Marrnee exercised over her household of women. Marmee loved her
daughters into submission, a submission that they didn’t recognize as such
because it was the inevitable response of the well-brought up young woman
whose mother loved her. However, Father could not love Marmee into
submission in like manner because, as a man, his faculties were rational and of

the sort “necessary to check woman’s emotion,” while Marmee’s womanly

16

“affection was required to socialize [his] masculine rationality" (Lewis 56). Within
the home, affection reigned supreme, and the woman had the edge there. The
separate spheres were neatly deﬁned (if not neatly applied and experienced), but
they did not so thoroughly disadvantage women as modern critics often claim,
particularly not in ﬁction. For Little Women this means that the novel balanced
uneasily between its designation as a sort of tract for female propriety and its
relatively radical (for nineteenth-century readers) egalitarian notions about
women’s place in society and within marriage and the family.

The focus on the primacy of the mother's role in the home is the
nineteenth-century incarnation of Republican Motherhood. Linda Kerber said of
the eighteenth-century version that “the Republican Mother’s life was dedicated
to the service of civic virtue: she educated her sons for it, she condemned and
corrected her husband’s lapses from it” (qtd. in Zagarri). Zagarri further notes that
“Republican motherhood preserved traditional gender roles at the same time that
it carved out a new, political role for women” (192). This role was assigned, by
definition, to the home, thus helping to reinforce the notion of separate spheres,
at least ideologically. Amelia Howe Kritzer suggests that Susanna Rowson’s
eighteenth—century plays attempted to make the ‘sphere barrier’ less restrictive
by presenting stories about women whose actions allowed ”the free infusion of
information and actions relating to public issues—a basic condition for the
exercise of republican motherhood.” She further suggests that the plays
“privilege the private sphere, bringing the public one within its scope” (160), and

this is way that Marmee and the little women attempt to affect their surroundings.

17

Their work outside the home and their corporal acts of charity are premised on
the notion that the more the outside world resembles the home - more
speciﬁcally, their home - the better the world will be.

The aspect of the text that is most often noted (besides its focus on the
family) is its female frame of reference. According to Elaine Showalter, Nina
Auerbach depicts this as a self-sustaining community of women (43), which is
exactly how the women functioned, both before and after Father went to war.
Related to this is the notion that domestic ﬁction is well-rooted in the material
aspects of women’s daily lives, and this seems natural since women bore the
primary responsibility for the material concerns of daily life. Discussing the
characters in Little Women, Auerbach comments on the physicality of the
descriptions of the women and the way that Alcott uses specific material objects
to help deﬁne her characters (132-5). This descriptive mode is typical of domestic
literature. Where purely sentimental literature tends to dwell on the extraordinary,
descriptions in domestic literature tend to be more firmly rooted in the quotidian,
rather than the exceptional, aspects of materiality. This is clearly the case with
Little Women. Thus readers know Jo by her writer’s paraphernalia, Amy by her
hair ribbons and other little vanities, Meg by her ﬁne gloves, and Beth by her
music. In like manner, Alcott describes each of the girls by her garden plot:

Hannah used to say, "I'd know which each of them gardings
belonged to, ef I see 'em in Chiny," and so she might, for the girls'
tastes differed as much as their characters. Meg's had roses and

heliotrope, myrtle, and a little orange tree in it. Jo's bed was never

18

alike two seasons, for she was always trying experiments. This
year it was to be a plantation of sun ﬂowers, the seeds of which
cheerful land aspiring plant were to feed Aunt Cockle-top and her
family of chicks. Beth had old-fashioned fragrant ﬂowers in her
garden, sweet peas and mignonette, larkspur, pinks, pansies, and
southernwood, with chickweed for the birds and catnip for the
pussies. Amy had a bower in hers, rather small and earwiggy, but
very pretty to look at, with honeysuckle and morning-glories
hanging their colored horns and bells in graceful wreaths all over it,
tall white lilies, delicate ferns, and as many brilliant, picturesque
plants as would consent to blossom there. (98)
Except for Jo’s writing tools, which could as readily belong to a man as to
a woman, all of these markers carry essentially feminine connotations.‘ That the
markers are so thoroughly feminine helps establish the text’s credibility as an
“edifying” story; that Jo’s writing tools are ambiguous markers help establish her
conflicted position as a young woman straining against convention. While her
writing implements do not suggest that she is trying to trespass on male turf
(indeed, most popular writing of the period was produced by the “scribbling
women” who gave Hawthorne such distress), Jo exhibits male behaviors such as
whistling, using slang, and “toasting” herself in front of the ﬁre. She also, during

her sojourn in New York, expresses the desire to write something of real worth,

 

‘ In the home context, the piano, which could also belong to a man, is generally portrayed, as in
this instance, as something for a woman to “master“ so that she might provide suitable evening
entertainment for her husband and family and/or accompany evening hymns dun'ng family
devotional time.

19

something a Goethe might have written. Taken together, these markers create
the image of a young woman who is eager for a taste of the things that, for her,
make a man’s life appealing, what she perceives as its freedom as well as its
power to act on the world. It is these same characteristics that make Jo so
appealing to readers; here is a woman who is acutely aware of her middle—class
position and its constraints but one who, nevertheless, “pushes the envelope”
without losing either her “femininity” or her identity as a thinking human being.

If there is an overarching theme in Little Women, it is one of struggle, but
struggle of a particular sort - the struggle to overcome personal faults; and the
faults are not always, or even usually, of the sort that imply a male inﬂuence.
Instead, the failings and the overcoming of those failings depict a desire to have
power over one’s self. This is, perhaps, the primary power Jo seeks in her
determination to be on equal footing with men and, later, with her husband. Jo
seems quite able to retain her independence, even after she is married, but she
does it from within the existing system. However, she does not ever seem to be
struggling to retain power, and her sisters don’t really seek power except of a
derivative sort. While l_.ittle Women contains a sub-text of resistance to male
domination, the real focus is on female “self” control, and it is here that the reader
can see most clearly the push for egalitarian relations between the sexes. The
goal is for the women to take charge of themselves in order to be suitable
spouses/helpmatesl partners for their husbands, and concomitantly good
mothers to their children. This was the essence of domesticity. The associated

message of female responsibility for social housekeeping stressed its basis in the

20

individual, private home. As a popular nineteenth-century women’s magazine
noted: “Let [woman] not look away from her own little family circle for the means
of producing moral and social reforms, but begin at home” (qtd. in Welter 163).

Elaine Showalter asserts: “Alcott’s novel of female development
dramatizes the Transcendental dream of sexually egalitarian lives of love and
work” (57). However, Charles Strickland claims that “[b]eginning with Lille
m, most of the families of which Alcott approved were families dominated
by women, and they are families that are curiously insulated from the larger
world. [. . .] masculine inﬂuence is scarcely visible in the work of Little Women”
(145). Both of these ideas can be supported by the text, and they co-exist in a
precarious balance among readers, modes of criticism, biographical
interpretations of Alcott and her work, and the culture from within which the text is
reproduced. The fact that these ideas can readily be supported by the original
text helps make Little Women the protean vehicle it is for producing, and
reproducing in later eras, the underlying ideology that informs the entire story:
that woman’s realm of the home is a good place from which to make a better
world and that that realm is constituted by a middle middle-class, nuclear family.

Alcott’s semi-ﬁctional family is a perfect specimen of the “typical”
American family, peopled by the sort of typical Americans who make up the
class. lts message is the sanctity of the private family home, and despite its
depiction of female power, it is described by Foster and Simon as “the archetypal
family novel” (17-8). Madeleine Stern makes a similar observation: [T]he

American countryside of the midnineteenth century was unfolded here, historic

21

notes of life and letters in New England were written, and under the roof of a
single new England home could be discovered all the homes of America” (Lou—isle
May Alcott 259). The public representation of the Alcott family’s ﬁctionalized
personae as an intensely private concern was also fairly representative of
Alcott’s own concerns about family issues and the proper care of children.
Parents, especially mothers, were responsible to “insulate their children from the
world of adulthood, shielding them from the workplace and from the adult
experience of sex, drugs, and alcohol” (Strickland 163). This focus on the
protected child is, however, problematic because the girls in the story are
growing up; soon they will be adult women with adult responsibility. They need to
learn how to cope with the world outside the home. The book is more than a tale
of how to keep children safe from outside inﬂuences; it is a blueprint for how to
help good girls become good women.

Even though it was classiﬁed as a children’s story, one that was suitable
for mothers to give their daughters, contemporary reviewers saw the book as
good for adults. Authors of sentimental children’s literature expected their
audience to encompass “a wide age range” and “[c]ontemporary reviews of

Alcott’s Little Women (1868) illustrate this: the Nation saw it as “not only very well

 

adapted to the readers for whom it is especially intended, but [it] may also be
read with pleasure by older people’; Hamr’s considered it ”a rather mature book
for the little women, but a capital one for their elders’” (Foster and Simon 9). In
part because Little Women never seriously transgressed the bounds of Victorian

American propriety, the novel could be employed as a realistic blueprint for

22

training girls to be good women - American women who could be both individuals
amt nurturing wives and mothers.

The nineteenth century saw the ﬁnal stages of a shift from a corporate
family economy to one where labor was “divisible into the wages, salaries, and
proﬁts of individual workers,” and this, in turn, contributed to a greater sense of
individualism in family members (Ryan 231 ). Such a social shift made the
individualistic elements of Little Women more palatable to middle-class readers -
especially since those elements were cloaked in the garb of “cottage industry."
True, “little women” went out to work, but that work was not allowed to intrude on
the home where they sewed, knitted, cleaned, and cooked, to all appearances
independent of the marketplace. The girls do not bring their work home with
them. While they might complain about the tedious jobs they have and wish that
they didn’t have to do them, they take comfort in the fact that they can come back
to the haven of the family home at the end of the day. Alcott merged a rural
(although not agrarian) family life with the March girls’ individual wage-earning
pursuits creating a neatly balanced amalgam that appealed to the desire for
individuality at the same time that it reinforced the primacy of home life over the
marketplace; it reinforced the notion that “the individualistic self inheres in its
difference from the market” (Brown 60). It also gloriﬁed sub-urban life while it
acknowledged the cultural advantages possible in larger urban areas. Thus
Concord, in the nineteenth century, apparently fulﬁlled every possible need,

material, spiritual, and cultural, that a person might have.

23

Notably, none of the work the Marches did was in an industrial setting
where any of them would be forced into daily contact with working class wage
earners. Indeed, the only persons who regularly interacted with the working class
were Beth and Marmee who looked after the Hummels, and that interaction was
the genteel pursuit of dispensing charity. To complete the retreat from the outside
world, Amy is removed from school to study at home where she will not be
subject to bad teaching practice and the negative inﬂuence of the other girls in
the school. This restriction of activity to genteel pursuits centered in the home
reinforced the boundaries between the inside and outside of the family. Safety
and propriety and comfort abode within the conﬁnes of the family. “Alcott thus
lent the power of her pen to the drift of opinion begun by the sentimental
revolution, a drift that can be called the privatization of Utopia. Pinning her hopes
on the nuclear family, Alcott ultimately rejected her father’s dreams of a
‘consociate family’ broader than the ties of blood and marriage” (Strickland 145).
Nevertheless, she has Jo and her husband, Professor Bhaer, open a boarding
school for boys — including their own sons who are thus being raised with the
children of non-family members, a distinctly “consociate” arrangement at odds
with the rest of the depictions of family in the novel.

Concern about family boundaries was common to nineteenth-century
novels, with their depictions of “missing heirs, secret marriages, and long-lost
relatives as routine ingredients in a novelist’s plot.” Penny Kane notes that these
elements “suggest a fundamental unease about the boundaries of the family and

one’s ability to order or preserve those boundaries against arbitrary fates" (154).

24

The nineteenth-century, middle-class family lived a precarious existence which
was embedded in a larger matrix of precarious social and political interactions.
The Marches, like many of their real-life counterparts, had experienced the
precariousness of middle-class fortunes, having lost their money through a bad
business deal their father had ﬁnanced. The marketplace was volatile, and social
forces including industrialization, urbanization, and immigration threatened
always to intrude on family life. As Groves and Groves note:
The rapid urbanization of the country was in itself a great social
problem and of great signiﬁcance in its effects on the domestic life
of the American people, and its evils also were increased by the
establishment of European groups in our chief cities who unlike
earlier immigrants did not lose themselves by mixing with the
natives but to a great extent maintained an alien cultural existence.
(174)
These external forces had the potential to destroy a family’s ﬁnancial position, its
private boundaries, even the gender relationships within the family. If a family’s
fortune was lost, children might be forced to ﬁnd work outside the home. In some
cases they might be placed in orphanages or with other relatives, removing them
from the immediate inﬂuence of parents — especially mothers — and subjecting
them to the vicissitudes of non-(nuclear) family inﬂuences. If the children didn’t
have to work, often the women did, with the result that men lost their status as
breadwinners. Concern over these potential disruptions profoundly altered

perceptions of the boundaries of the family, and middle-class families came to

25

rely upon the clear division between inside and outside to help maintain their
sense of both class and family.

Colleen McDannelI asserts: “The Victorians were not a private people
concerned with constructing a hiding place in the world; they were a public
people who sought to deﬁne themselves through display of their sense of
‘election.’ The domestic environment was not only created for the good of the
family, it had to be presented to the public as evidence for the goodness of the
family” (153). Nevertheless, there were speciﬁc rules for how people outside the
family were made privy to that “evidence of goodness,” and those rules limited
access to the domestic space to persons of the same class as the family and to
their domestic help. More realistic is Ellen M. Plante’s characterization that
“[Women] were expected to live their lives comforting work-weary husbands,
devoting themselves to molding young children into moral, upright citizens and
fashioning homes that were at once a retreat from the outside world as well as a
cultural inventory of reﬁnement, social standing, intellect and honor” (xi). In me
119%. when Mr. March comes back from the war, he comes home to just such
a haven, retreating into his study where people ﬂocked to hear his words of
wisdom while Marrnee maintained the kind of home where he could be wise in
peace.

Although the story is set during the Civil War, the war intrudes very little on
the home. Indeed, when Marmee receives a letter from Mr. March on Christmas

Eve, it says little “of the hardships endured, the dangers faced, or the sickness

conquered; it was a cheerful, hopeful letter [. . .]” (14). Instead, the war is used

26

as a convenient means for removing Mr. March from home without eliminating
his patriarchal presence. Thus, when Marmee decides to remove Amy from
school, she determines that Amy will study at home with Beth until such time as
Father has advised her about what to do next (71 ). Marmee may be strong, but
she also depends upon Father in his role as head of the family, even though she
appears to be perfectly capable of making decisions on her own.

When Father does return from the war, one year after the beginning of the
novel, his ﬁrst extended speech reinforces the patriarchal structure of the
household. Although Marmee had earlier given the girls their copies of Pilgrim’s
Progress to use as guides for self-improvement, Father pronounces judgment on
what his ‘little women’ have accomplished over the past twelve months. He tells
Meg “I value the womanly skill which keeps home happy more than white hands
or fashionable accomplishments”; he tells Jo ”I see a young lady who . . . moves
quietly, and takes care of a certain little person in a motherly way which delights
me (216). For a country working through the aftermath of the Civil War, this was
reassuringly normal. While the girls might strive for the egalitarian ideal
Showalter describes, they are also acquiring the womanly traits necessary for
good nineteenth-century middle-class homes, the same traits that Marmee
exhibits and which follow the approved patriarchal path.

Another issue Alcott’s treats is immigration and here she demonstrates
both the concern for maintaining family boundaries and the ambivalence many
Americans felt about the masses of immigrants crossing national borders. As

noted above, a particular problem concerned those immigrants who failed to

27

become fully Americanized. The plot line that follows the Hummel family is
cautionary, showing how difﬁcult it is for certain classes of immigrants to
integrate into American culture. The plot line that follows Professor Bhaer is, if
not celebratory, at least a positive representation of an immigrant story, showing
that America really is the land of opportunity and that hard work is rewarded.
Indeed, prior to imposing immigration quotas in the 19205, “there were several
enactments by Congress that attempted to improve the quality of the immigration
coming to the United States” (Groves and Groves 174). The point was not to
keep out immigrants, but to be more selective about the kinds of immigrants who
were admitted.

The immigrant Hummels are the poor mother and her six children who
receive the March girls Christmas breakfast at the beginning of the novel. The
reader knows that they are classed as “deserving poor’ because Marmee has
elected to help them. Nineteenth-century charity was always monitored to assure
that receiving aid did not result in dependence on that charity and also to assure
that the recipients were not somehow “cheating” on the system. Because
Marmee chose to help them, the reader can be certain that she did the
appropriate screening ﬁrst; the reader can also vicariously dispense charity.
Although Little Women was not part of the literature of philanthropy that Deborah
Carlin discusses, its approach to philanthropy relies on the same kind of social
distinctions she discusses. In particular, Little Women demonstrates the kind of
philanthropy that “stresses good will, generosity, and monetary contributions as

the agencies of social welfare” without considering what social and economic

28

reforms might be more effective (204). She further notes that “these narratives
conceive of women reformers within an essentially conservative ideology; the
home, for American women in the late nineteenth century, _w_a_s the world”
(emphasis in original 208). This agglomeration of home and world provided
women of the upper and middle classes with an opportunity to act on their
environment without losing their status as true women. It also exposed them to
segments of the population they would not otherwise have associated with, an
association that necessarily challenged their preconceptions about how the world
works and how they themselves ﬁt into the world. Barbara Berg notes that
women’s involvement in voluntary associations helped women, individually and
collectively, in their “quest for identity.” At the same time that women were
discovering themselves as individuals, their activities also “formed a plausible
response to urban problems” (156). Their quest for individual identity was
reciprocally reinforced by the work they did outside of their own homes. In
Alcott’s ﬁction, identity is intimately associated with activity, a sort of you-are-
what-you-do approach to self, and that identity relied on, in part, “[a] set of
traditions and folklore [that] tied middle-class groups together and upheld their
world view. In a nation with no formal aristocracy, the ‘best people’ had a
profound sense of their own moral leadership.” These ‘best people’ constituted
what is necessarily loosely termed the middle class. They shared a social sense
of their place in the world, one that they could see as egalitarian because “all
Americans could enter the respectable community provided they lived according

to its norms” (May 4-5).

29

The Hummels give the little women the opportunity to prove themselves
charitable, and Marmee is sufﬁciently determined to help the Hummels that she
enlists the aid of a wealthy acquaintance who can better afford to continue the
task of philanthropic reform that the Marches have begun, reform that should
make the Hummels part of the respectable community.

The Hummel’s situation is similar to the March’s in that both families are
without the support of a male breadwinner. The Marches, of course, could take
employment and thus retain control of their lives (family). However, for the
Hummels, wage work could not substitute for the father’s lost income. First, Mrs.
Hummel spoke only a little English, a major impediment to a job search. Second,
she was a mother whose ﬁrst duty was to her home and young children. Even if
she had been able to ﬁnd work, she would have had to leave her children
unsupervised while she was away from the house. Therefore, it was much better
that she rely on the kindness of others than that she should take an active role in
providing for herself and her children. That role belonged to the father who had
left.

The difference between his leaving and Mr. March’s leaving is that the
former was desertion - implicitly for the selﬁsh reason of not wishing to care for
his family - whereas Mr. March was selﬂessly serving as chaplain to men fighting
in the Civil War. This difference justiﬁed the necessity for the March women to
work outside the home. Mr. March was criticized for not providing properly for his
family, but not because he had left for the war. He was criticized for the poor

ﬁnancial judgment that forced his family into genteel poverty, the sort that

30

allowed for a housekeeper if not for new dresses. However, Mrs. Hummel,
although a victim of desertion, is also a victim of her gender. Aside from the fact
that she is physically too weak to work, having just borne her seventh child, she
bears the stigma of being a woman who has been deserted. She is thus forced to
carry some of the blame for her husband’s bad behavior while Mrs. March is
implicitly commended for her efforts in support of the war effort.

The Hummel family serves as a trope for problems surrounding
immigration. The factories relied heavily on immigrant labor as a means of
keeping wages as low as possible. Although immigrants “glutted the labor
market, lowering wages and causing greater unemployment,” it was to the
advantage of factory owners to have an excess of laborers to draw from, and
heavy immigration provided that excess labor force (Berg 42). Heavy immigration
also gave reformers another target for reform efforts: Americanization of the
aliens. In addition to the need to train workers to function in a factory setting and
according to set hours and days of work, the newcomers had to learn to function
within the American system of social organization and government. Reform
efforts took many guises, but the focus of reform efforts was the family. The
rationale was, apparently, that if the family could be made to fit the American
middle-class mold, then the individual members of the family would better fit their
appropriate roles as American workers, in the case of the men and boys in the
household, and as “domestic angels,” in the case of the women and girls.

Immigrant families would then more closely resemble their middle-class mentors,

having been safely homogenized into middle-class American culture.

31

There was sufﬁcient concern about the kinds of immigrants who were
being admitted to the US that in 1856 there was a naturalization bill before
Congress that required “proof of character both before and since the applicant
emigrated” (Hoffman 1213). Not only were the applicants for citizenship
supposed to be the right sort of people; they also needed “an extended period of
republican schooling” in order to be able to properly participate in the political
system (1214). This was the same sort of concern for proper Americanism that
the philanthropically-minded exhibited when they sought to train new immigrants
in the American way of life.

Alcott’s immigrants fall into two categories: those who “melt” and those
who don’t. The Hummel family never quite succeeds in becoming American. With
no breadwinner in the home, they are forced to remain objects of charity. Since
one of the most sacred tropes of middle-class Americanism is self-sufﬁciency,
and the Hummels are unable to be self-sufﬁcient, they can never be truly
American. A further impediment to their assimilation is the language. They can
barely communicate their needs to English speakers, and there is no indication
later on that their English skills improve sufﬁciently to help them find work. They
are effectively infants who must be cared for, rather than good candidates for
citizenship by reform of their ethnic practices and acquisition of American
characteristics. Professor Bhaer is in quite a different category.

The Professor has a thick German accent and sometimes has trouble
thinking of just the right English word to use; nevertheless, he has a good

command of the language and is demonstrably well-educated, a fact that is

32

proven by his small but well-chosen library of works by German philosophers and
poets and the complete works of Shakespeare. Additionally, he is self-
supporting, although in the feminized profession of teaching children. He also
works hard at learning the correct way to do things in America rather than relying
solely on his middle-class European manners. His only fault is that he is male
and therefore in need of someone like Jo — that is, someone female — to perform
simple tasks for him such as sewing on buttons and darning socks.2 Unlike the
Hummels, the Professor is a good example of a well-assimilated immigrant, so
good, in fact, that he is actually allowed to become a part of the March family by
marrying Jo.

Not only were Americans ambivalent about allowing immigration, but they
were also anxious to prevent the erosion of distinctly American characteristics
that exposure to aliens with different social conventions might cause. Post-bellum
restrictions on immigration slowed the inﬂux of newcomers, but there were many
ethnic enclaves already established in the cities. Accordingly, reform efforts
intended for those immigrants who were not necessarily charity cases focused on
teaching the newcomers how to become American in their speech, eating, dress,
and work behaviors. Men and women entered into charity work intent on bringing
middle-class values to the largely immigrant working class. The juxtaposition of
the Hummels and Professor Bhaer in Little Women gave readers the message

that immigration could be managed from the home. At the same time, as Barbara

 

2 This is another place where Alcott subverts the potential of the story for working as an agent of
change; Jo, the not-at-alI-domestic, nevertheless can provide feminine service for helpless men
and does so gladly (Alcott 329). Where there is need, Jo becomes the selﬂess “domestic angel’
her mother hoped to train.

33

Sicherman notes, for certain immigrant women, and some men as well, the book
was a blueprint for how to become a middle-class American (263). With its focus
on the home, and with no real external markers to position that home in a
particular time or place, any reader could identify with the characters and the
situations they found themselves in.

One external marker absent from the text is modern (nineteenth-century)
technology, either in its industrialized form or within the home. The level of
technology available in homes was fairly limited, since most homes still had their
own wells and outhouses, and there was little or no central heating or gas
lighting, and stoves burned wood or coal. Because most actual housekeeping
chores were never mentioned in the story, there were no references to what
might later be seen as old-fashioned. People still do hand sewing and knitting
and baking, but today they do these by electric light or they use electric or gas
stoves. If the story says that the girls sew by lamplight, there’s no indication that
the lamp in question is not electric. In ﬁlm adaptations of the story, the periodicity
of the representation contributes to a romanticized picture of nineteenth-century
home life. Candles and oil lamps provide as much light as 3-way, 50-75-100 watt
bulbs, and fireplaces evenly heat entire rooms - or whole houses - as efﬁciently
(and cleanly) as central gas heat. Even though the accoutrements of the
nineteenth century are evident, none of the inconvenience that would make them
seem old-fashioned is apparent.

The problems of urbanization are kept at some distance from the March

household. Most growing urban centers were growing because of

34

industrialization, and the combination of increased numbers of people in the
cities and the dirt associated with industrial production made urban areas prime
targets for complaint as well as reform efforts. However, the March’s, suburban
situation protected them from the ills of city life. Except for Mrs. March’s journey
to Washington, DC. to nurse her husband, the only city exposure any of the
women have is Jo’s sojourn in New York. She lives, appropriately, in a
respectable boarding house - complete with young children - while she tries her
hand at earning a living by writing. Yet her exposure to the city is limited to her
trips to various publishers and occasional outings to classical music events and
intellectual evenings with Miss Norton, one of the other boarders in Mrs. Kirke’s
house. It is as if there were no city but rather an invisible infrastructure that
allowed for expensive propositions such as operas and symphonies and
publishing houses that existed apparently independently of the substructures
necessary “in real life” to make these things possible. The result is another non-
marker, a city in the abstract that can become any city in any time or place. Jo
never encountered ethnic enclaves, factories or factory workers, or tenement
conditions. There is nothing about her experience to mark this city as New York I
except the naming of the city in the text.

Another result of the “unmarked” city is that the city need not have
anything to do with the family, either the Marches or the Kirkes with whom Jo
lives. Families in cities, unless they were at least in the upper middle class could
not live in that ideal family space, the private home. Most city dwellers lived in

boarding houses or tenements, neither of which provided the kind of safe

35

bounding for the boarding family that a private home was presumed to provide,
although a boarding house afforded the landlord or landlady the option of
keeping their children away from the other boarders in private quarters.3 In a
boarding house, most of the residents were single individuals; any family would
normally be children of the (usually) landlady who still lived at home (as with the
Kirkes). Tenements afforded families multiple rooms, even if not necessarily
enough space, but at a price that included sharing, among other things sanitation
facilities, clotheslines, noise from the neighbors and noise and dirt from the city.
There is evidence that for many city dwellers tenements functioned as
neighborhoods within the larger, impersonal city space, and in this context,
Christine Stansell discusses the interconnectedness of tenement life and the
ﬂuidity and permeability of home boundaries. She notes: “These shifting
communities of cooperation and contention had none of the counterbalancing
elements of the female domestic sphere of calm and affection that bourgeois
men and women prized“ (62). It was this sort of deviance from the middle-class
standard that much domestic literature sought to correct, at least ﬁctionally.

The March family was apparently apolitical and thus could stand for any
family that aspired to middle-class domesticity. Within that deﬁnition, however,
Alcott inserted several ambiguities. For one thing, she incorporated some of her
father’s notions of egalitarian marital relations, leaving open the question of just

how much equality was desirable. She likewise emphasized the desirability of

 

3 Marc McCutcheon’s dictionary of the 18005 quotes T.C. Grattan’s Civilized America and Edward
Martin’s Secrets of the Great City descriptions of living arrangements in urban and industrial
areas. Their then current (nineteenth-century) observations are strikingly similar to many of the
points Christine Stansell makes in her 1987 study of women in New York.

36

education for women without suggesting that they take their education outside of
the home. She made fun of the ostentation of upper middle-class attitudes about
propriety while representing middle-class notions of propriety as the more
desirable norm. Women, obviously, worked outside the home, but that work was
treated as a temporary aberration rather than normative. Alcott allowed Jo, as a
relatively young woman, the freedom to play the “tomboy,” but ultimately she had
to make Jo a wife and the mother of sons to legitimate her expression of the
‘masculine’ side of her nature as an adult.

These ambiguities can be read as anything from simple questioning of the
status quo to radical suggestions for social reform, particularly in gender-related
issues. Nevertheless, the text is clearly grounded in idealized and relatively
conservative nineteenth-century social and cultural norms. The fact of these
ambiguities, along with a very comfortable and relatively stress-free,
representation of the family, allows for easy translation of the story into later
ideologies of society and the family. The lack of distinctive external markers is
another factor easing this transition, as is the simplicity of the plot. The multitude
of anecdotes makes adaptations easy, as does the fact that there is little in the
way of linearity in the telling of the story. Thus, most of the incidents can be
arranged, or rearranged, to suit the dramatic fancy of the playwright or
screenwriter. This ease of transition from one time period to another results in a
text that brings nineteenth-century thought into the present with little or no sense
of anomaly arising in the reader of the text. The several film adaptations to be

discussed will demonstrate this more clearly.

37

The novel itself ends in rather a rush in the last chapter with Jo and the
Professor marrying, opening a boarding school for boys, and having two sons of
their own — all in the space of ten pages. The last scene in the book is of all the
March sisters and their families gathered at Plumfield to harvest apples with the
boys from the school. None of this chapter is included in the ﬁlm versions of the
story; omitting it establishes the romantic nature of the ﬁlm versions by keeping
the focus at the end of these ﬁlms on Jo’s and the Professor's love for each
other. It also avoids the difﬁculty of ﬁtting the atypical Bhaer household/school
into the private family protocol so painstakingly established in the other forty-six

chapters of the book and later so faithfully rendered on screen.

38

Chapter 2

Unto the Third and Fourth Generation

In 1933 Little Women was made into a sound ﬁlm for the first time. The
film opens with the image on screen of an avenue of oaks leading to a spacious
home — not a mansion, of course, but a comfortable, private space at the end of
a long drive. The musical score playing during the opening credits has a vaguely
Stephen Foster sound to it, as if it should be familiar, yet it is not. (The title of the
music is, appropriately, “Josephine.”) Within moments of the beginning of the
ﬁlm, anyone familiar with the story will realize that things on the screen are going
to be different from things in the novel. Aside from the necessary changes to the
story that any adaptation of a novel to ﬁlm will entail, the director and/or
screenwriters have aurally and visually changed the venue of the story. The
novel is set in Concord, Massachusetts during the Civil War. The avenue of oaks,
however, belongs to the plantations of the South, as does the Stephen Foster
sort of music which recalls strains of “The Old Folks at Home.” Since the story
opens on Christmas Eve, a light snowfall is added as the credits roll, re-placing
the story in Concord, complete with snow and a very New England-style of
middle-class cottage.

There seems to be no reason for the dislocation evidenced in the opening
of this Oscar-winning screenplay; however, one possibility that suggests itself is
that the studio wanted to be sure the ﬁlm did not offend any potential moviegoer,

North or South. In 1933 there were still living veterans of the Civil War, and many

39

Southerners still harbored ill-feelings about that conﬂict.1 As the fourth
generation incarnation of an extremely popular story, and as an adaptation from
a novel, it was easy enough for screenwriters and director to blur the distinctions
and keep the focus on the story of the girls and their mother. Of course, other
explanations are possible, but tying North and South together in the opening
certainly proclaims a national unity that the original did not, a unity that was
severely taxed by the Depression. Alcott never discussed the politics of the war
in the story, but her depiction of a family stressed by the separation caused by
war would have made the war very present to her original readers. By the fourth
generation of readers - and now viewers - of the story, the Civil War was not as
present as it had been in 1868. Nevertheless, it was not as far removed from
them as it is from present day audiences. Blurring the markers distinguishing
North from South only made sense.

One reason the conﬂation of venues worked is that the ﬁlm was an
adaptation of a novel. Many viewers of the ﬁlm would have read the novel, a fact
that works both to the advantage a_nd to the disadvantage of the adapters. For
example, a particular viewer’s recollection of the descriptions in the novel may
not include an avenue of oaks, primarily because there is no speciﬁc description
of the environs surrounding the March home; but the possibility of such a stand
of trees certainly exists. So it would be easy enough for a viewer to accept the
image as “accurately" portraying the way the drive up to the March house looked.

A viewer could, however, as easily reject the image, thus refusing to suspend

 

1 Federal Writer’s Project interviews include several with veterans or the children of veterans that
were recorded between 1936 and 1940.

40

disbelief sufﬁciently to be drawn in to the writer's vision. Nevertheless, the
comfortable home at the end of the avenue is unmistakably of New England
provenance. Whether it looks the way a viewer might expect it to look, it
resonates with other homelike images - ads in magazines, pictures in story
books, house plans in newspapers, for example. The mix of images offers
virtually every viewer some idea of home to connect with.

This opening is as much a part of the adaptation of the novel as the
dialogue and action in the ﬁlm proper. Where novels can spend pages describing
settings, a ﬁlm must accomplish description with images and sound; in this case
the images and sound help place the story in a speciﬁc “home” even though
there is only the most cursory description of the house in the novel. Willemen
identifies language as having primacy among “all other systems of
communication” and that, as a result, “verbal signiﬁers are present in, and have a
structuring effect on, the very formation of images (camera angles, the ﬁguration
of characters and events in narrative ﬁlm)” (27-8). These verbal signiﬁers function
here to make the image of home in the ﬁlm serve as a trope for home for the
audience.

Part of the artistry of translating a novel to the screen involves realizing
visually what had been available only verbally, something this opening
accomplishes. Another part of that artistry involves making a story written for a
particular audience (in this case, adolescent girls) appeal to a larger, more
diverse audience that includes women (as well as men) older than eighteen.

Some of the factors that gave the novel broad appeal work for the film as well:

41

the little women act older than their purported ages; they are allowed a great deal
of personal freedom; they deal effectively with real life issues; they are portrayed
as intelligent people who are respected by the men in their lives; and they
manage all of this while retaining their femininity. Most of these ideas make their
way into the ﬁlm, although the perspective is often different from that in the novel.

The ﬁlm was produced in 1933 by Merian C. Cooper for RKO/Radio and
directed by George Cukor. The screenplay was written by Sarah Y. Mason and
Victor Heerman. Marmee was played by Spring Byington, Meg by Frances Dee,
Jo by Katharine Hepburn, Beth by Jean Parker, and Amy by Joan Bennett. Other
characters included Douglass Montgomery as Laurie, Henry Stepehenson as Mr.
Laurence, John Davis Lodge as John Brooke, Paul Lukas as Professor Bhaer,
and Edna May Oliver as Aunt March.

The ﬁlm begins with a scene showing Marmee at work at the United
States Christian Commission, and Jo is first shown reading to Aunt March. Aunt
March gives Jo one dollar each for herself and her sisters as a Christmas gift,
and Jo hurries home to share the good fortune. The sisters plan what to do with
their money and then begin to practice Jo’s play for the party they are planning
for Christmas day when Marmee arrives with a letter from Father. The letter
makes each of the girls decide to be unselﬁsh about Christmas and give Marmee
gifts instead of buying things for themselves. On Christmas day they give away
their breakfast to the poor Hummel family.

From this point on, the story revolves around the various love interests

that develop as the girls grow up. First they make the acquaintance of Laurie, the

42

orphaned young man who is the grandson of their neighbor, the wealthy Mr.
Laurence. Through him, Meg meets Mr. Brooke, whom she later marries.
Meanwhile, Laurie develops a strong romantic attraction for Jo, which she
rejects. He goes off to college and then to Europe where he meets Amy who is
traveling as Aunt March’s companion. Jo goes to New York to try her hand at a
writing career and there meets Professor Bhaer, whom she eventually becomes
engaged to. While she is in New York, Beth becomes seriously ill and Jo returns
home to help nurse her. Beth dies, and Jo writes her ﬁrst really good work, which
Professor Bhaer manages to get published. He comes to Concord to give her the
book and when the two of them meet, he stumblingly proposes to Jo and she
accepts. Here the film ends, with the Professor going home with Jo.

True-to-the-book school of ﬁlm adaptation critics will always be
disappointed in a ﬁlm adaptation because the ﬁlm cannot ever ”show" all that the
novel includes. Brian McFarlane notes that each reader of a novel will bring a
different image of that novel’s contents to his or her reading of the ﬁlm - just as
the screenwriter and director will - and that the best of adaptations are bound to
displease as many people as they please. The essence-of-the—story critics will
inevitably be disappointed because every reader’s “essence” will necessarily
differ from other readers’ versions (8-11). The degree of difference will determine
the level of dissatisfaction, but no one reader will ever be fully satisfied with
someone else’s interpretation of a novel become film. Thus each ﬁlm version of
Little Women must traverse the gulfs both of time and of prior incarnations,

whether on paper, on ﬁlm, or in the reader’s or viewer’s mind. Later ﬁlm versions

43

of Qttle Women necessarily appear to “adapt” earlier ﬁlm versions as well as the
novel itself. Later versions are also subject to the social and cultural realities of
the era when they are produced, resulting in period-speciﬁc adaptations of the
story.

Considering the 1933 ﬁlm version of Little Women as an entity unto itself,
additional insights present themselves. The most obvious reason for depicting
the avenue and the house at its end is to create the sense of a safe and secure
home. The trees of the avenue are old; they speak, visually, of stability and a
long-term commitment to their care. The house is charming, inviting, a place that
can rightfully be someone’s home. The music, with its sweet, old-fashioned
sound played on violin, is evocative of old, familiar things, such as one’s own
home or memories of someone who might have played or sung such music. In a
very few moments of film time, the director has engaged the audience, creating
in them the desire to enter this archetypal home and to engage with its
inhabitants. These elements would undoubtedly have been reassuring for
audiences who were all too well aware of the fragile hold on stability they
themselves had during the Depression year of 1933. As Dixon Wecter observed
in his 1948 history of the Depression, “Those who still clung to jobs or oscillated
between spells of work and idleness were haunted by the same bogey of
insecurity” (33). In the language of this particular ﬁlm, the still picture behind the
rolling credits becomes an anchor, reminding the audience of what they would
like to remember - a golden past with a warm and welcoming family home.

Indeed, one contemporary commentator noted that the ﬁlm itself depicted

44

“hardship test[ing] the good, sturdy traits of character possessed by the men and
women who had to rebuild a stricken nation” and continued with the idea that
“[p]ossibly the theme finds its analogy in the need of people today for the
strength of character with which to meet the demands of more modern times”
(Noble 213) — times that included mass unemployment and the specter of
poverty.

The idea of family created by the ﬁlm’s opening sequence mirrors
precisely that idea as it is presented in the novel. Despite the hardships the
Alcotts actually lived through, Little Women portrays a very stable environment
where no one need fear losing her home or her place in that home. That stability
is only threatened when the members of the household assume new roles and
move into other households. Thus the ﬁlm shows, later, that Jo’s greatest
distress, aside from Beth’s death, results from Meg’s marriage disrupting this
harmonious arrangement. However, the basis of the ﬁlm remains the family
anchored in the family home.

The action of the ﬁlm begins with Union soldiers marching through
Concord to a martial setting of “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” In much the
same way that the avenue of oaks described above helped to blur the divisions
between North and South, this conﬂation of a Sunday school song serving as a
marching tune for an army unit tends to sanitize the notion of war and ﬁghting.
The implication is that these soldiers intend to protect “all the little children of the
world,” rather than to engage in the business of war. Following the soldiers, the

viewer comes upon the United States Christian Commission where Marmee is

45

working on Christmas Eve giving what aid and comfort she can to soldiers and
their families. It is here that mention is ﬁrst made of the terrible cost of war when
an old man comes in looking for an overcoat so that he can visit the last of his
four sons who is dying in a hospital in Washington. Marmee finds him a coat and
also generously gives him some cash for the journey. The screenplay also gives
her the ﬁrst of the many little [morality] speeches in the film.

She tells her co-worker that she is ashamed of how little she contributes to
the war effort compared to the old man who has just left - on the surface, a
simple statement of sentiment. On another level, though, it easily ﬁt the rhetoric
of the day, intimating that everyone could do more than they were doing to make
things better simply by sacriﬁcing a little more. During a time of crisis such as the
Depression, sentiments like Mrs. March’s helped viewers retain their belief in the
efﬁcacy of individual effort. Additionally, Marmee is exercising her womanly
responsibilities by giving the old man some extra help and by sounding a call to
action that any woman could respond to. This particular scene is only reported in
the novel; in fact, aside from this incident, Marmee’s work outside the home is
only alluded to, never experienced, except for the time she and the girls give
away their Christmas breakfast. By adding the opening sequence, from the
soldiers through the fade from the Christian Commission, the director and
screenwriters have established a much more direct connection with the outside
world than the novel portrays. This seems ﬁtting at a time when the realities of
the outside world were making themselves felt inside the homes of even the

relatively comfortable middle class. At the same time, the ﬁlm reinforces the

46

notion that women have a special capacity for nurturing, a nineteenth-century
notion that is here reinvented to ﬁt the sensibilities of the 19305.

Jo March explodes into this fairly predictable environment, apparently bent
on the complete renovation of all rules of etiquette and behavior applying to
young women. She dusts Aunt March’s banister by sitting on it and sliding down.
When she meets her sisters on the way home, she insists on hailing and waving
at the neighbor boy who is watching from his window. Once home, she chooses
to jump the fence rather than walk through the gate. Inside the house, she stands
in front of the ﬁre and warms her backside in a fashion reminiscent of men
holding their split-tail coats open while they stand before the hearth. When Meg
tells Jo that she ought to behave more like a lady, now that she has “turned her
hair up,” Jo rips the pins out of her hair and lets it fall over her shoulders. Clearly,
this is a young woman straining against the rules of behavior that bound her life;
yet she also a young woman who wants very much to please her parents. Again,
in this sequence the screenwriters combine elements of description from the
novel combined with scenes of their own invention (Jo does not slide down the
banister at Aunt March’s house nor does she jump the fence at home) to create
Jo’s persona. The tomboyish behaviors tend to modernize Jo while the
sentiments her sisters express during the sequence promote the nineteenth-
century values and sensibilities the novel promotes.

The next sequence prepares the way for the signature mise-en-scene of
the ﬁlm version of Little Women, one that is repeated in one form or another in

virtually every later ﬁlm incarnation of the story, a scene that is copied directly

47

from the description in the novel. All of the girls are home from their various
enterprises and are awaiting Marmee’s return. After some sibling spatting, the
girls heed Beth’s cautionary statement: “Birds in their little nest agree.” Not
necessarily accurate zoologically, it nevertheless serves to make the point that
the family is supposed to serve as a haven from the stresses outside the home.
This is one of many “utopian” moments in the ﬁlm — and in the novel. The mere
reminder that they ought to be loving and considerate of each other is enough to
make the group harmonious again, something even Eleanor Roosevelt promoted
during the Depression, noting: “In spite of everything, it is the homes of America
which still form the basis or our civilization. [. . .] if families keep their love and
affection for each other, and will try to be tolerant and understanding of each
others problems, in the end, I think our civilization will not suffer" (My; 259).
In the ﬁlm, the table is set for tea, Marmee’s slippers are warmed by the fire, and
when she returns she brings with her a letter from Father. For this brief moment,

the entire family is reunited, at least in spirit, and the stage is set for the “photo

op.
Marmee is ensconced in her chair in front of the ﬁre and each of the girls
assumes her position around the chair, creating a sort of halo around Marmee.
The result is the visualization of an American Victorian image of heaven: the
sacred hearth attended by the angels of the house. The image, however, goes
further. After hearing just a bit of the very moving letter from Father, each of the
girls resolves to be just what Father wants her to be. Heaven turns out to be in

the charge of “the Father,” after all, as the girls each pledge to strive for the

48

perfection of person that Father has urged on them, not least of whom is Jo
whose pledge to behave like a “little woman” comes in such striking opposition to
her earlier behavior. Thus does an independent young woman fall under
patriarchal sway.

The mise-en-scene, slightly altered, is reprised later when the women
gather around the piano with Amy, Marmee, Meg on one side and Jo, still ﬁghting
the constraints of Victorian femininity, singing tenor on the other while Beth
accompanies the evening hymn. After one chorus of “Abide With Me,” the scene
fades out and everyone gets back to the business at hand - everyday life —
‘sanctiﬁed’ by pure nineteenth-century Christianity at work: the sort of home
religion that put women both in competition as well as cahoots with the
nineteenth-century clergy. This is one of the “church” scenes in the ﬁlm, the
nineteenth-century, Protestant American, home church. Family devotional books
of the 19305 encouraged exactly this sort of behavior, complete with nineteenth-
century hymns and prayers. Typical of these is Devotional Talks for women’s
Organizations which urged mother’s to “real Home Missionary work” with their
own children, especially when those children were out of school for the summer
(Ivy 30).2 While the scene might seem to show something old-fashioned, it would
not have seemed especially dated to moviegoers — particularly those who were
members of Protestant churches. (The other home church scene is Meg’s garden

wedding, a scene later in the ﬁlm, with Father ofﬁciating and the sisters radiant all

 

2 This booklet is part of a collection of similar works with titles such as The Place of Help. Sparks
of Truth. The Star Promise, and By the Still Waters published between 1925 and 1940. The
collection is in the library of First-Trinity Presbyterian Church in Laurel, Mississippi.

 

49

round. In this case, though, the emphasis is on Jo’s mourning of the passing of
an all-female ménage rather than the Christian home.)

The image of family inscribed in this film is a masterful reworking of the
image derived from the novel. Alcott’s vision combined the Victorian middle-class
sense of the propriety and privacy appropriate for a single family with certain
progressive notions about the acceptability of women having ambitions that
reached beyond the household. Nevertheless, her rendering of the family
retained its patriarchal focus along with the roles inscribed for its female
members: women were to create a physically and spiritually harmonious
environment and eschew any activities that might threaten that harmony. The
film, although it attenuates this vision of home and hearth, manages to maintain a
sense of the primacy of the family while making the vision more modern.

Showing the girls at work is one of the modernizing moves the
screenwriters make. Many women who would not or might not have chosen to
work outside the home sought employment during the 1930s in order to maintain
their households (Wecter 25-26). Since the sisters in Little Women were also
forced to seek employment, viewers could readily identify with the screen action.
The necessary changing of scenes in order to move the story breaks down the
sense of the family home as the center of the girls’ lives, but the girls’ actions
keep home a central concern. For example, when Jo is in New York, her letters
to the family serve to keep her connected with home in spite of her new friends
and experiences. In the film, the family is not mentioned as often as it is in the

novel, but when the letter arrives telling her about Beth’s serious condition, home

50

becomes more important than what she is doing on her own. In like manner,
Amy’s pleasure in the trip to Europe is lost to the same concern for her sister at
home.

The difference between the novel and the ﬁlm in this regard is that in the
novel the references to home and family keep the action grounded in the home
while in the ﬁlm individual settings show the girls apparently independent of
home - until a crisis draws them back. Part of this has to do with the exigencies
of adaptation: It is not possible to provide every clue to the home tie in the ﬁlm
that is contained in the novel. Also, when scenes change, the visual images do
not usually include reminders of home. The viewer is not likely to be thinking of
what she cannot see, particularly if there is no aural clue to bring the image to
mind. However, the relationships among the family are so well-established at the
beginning of the ﬁlm that, when home calls, it seems only natural that each of the
girls would give up what she is doing and return. The home tie takes precedence
over anything else that is happening so that, despite the portrayal of female
independence, the women remain bound to the home. What the screenwriters
have done is to translate the Victorian version of the private nuclear family into a
twentieth-century model, retaining the sentimentality of the earlier version while
portraying some of the realities of modern life.

Another of the modernizing moves the screenwriters make is to allow Jo to
go on outings with Professor Bhaer, outings which are pure ﬁlm fabrication. In the
novel, she never goes anywhere in public with him except when Miss Norton,

one of Mrs. Kirke’s boarders, invites both of them out for a “literary evening.” As

51

Anne Hollander notes: “No well-bred young woman of the 18605 would ever have
gone outwith a strange gentleman in a strange city” (100). The outings with
Professor Bhaer, however, provide the opportunity for the development of a
romantic interest many moviegoers would have expected. Viewers are made
aware of the Professor’s attraction to Jo well before she becomes aware of it
herself. Having only the most honorable intentions, and realizing that he can’t
support a wife and family as he would want to, the Professor refrains from
making any hint to Jo about how he feels. Here sentimental notions about
courtship and male roles are overlaid on the modernized relationship Jo and the
Professor have in the ﬁlm, bringing more nineteenth-century notions into the
twentieth century.

The most far-reaching adaptive move that Heerman and Mason make in
this ﬁlm is making the story revolve around Jo. Noble claims that “all the simple
events that happen in this family are brought into the story for the purpose of
showing their effect on Jo” (214). This is something of an overstatement, given
the number of key scenes the other girls have and which do not affect Jo. The
sequence dealing with Mr. Laurence’s gift of a piano to Beth is one example. Jo
ﬁrst meets Mr. Laurence after he has overheard her telling Laurie exactly what
she thinks of the old gentleman, based on his portrait hanging over the mantle.
Rather embarrassed to have been overheard, she nevertheless holds her ground
and wins the old man’s respect. The situation with Beth is much different. After
having come to Mr. Laurence’s house for several weeks to play his grand piano,

Beth makes him a pair of slippers by way of a thank-you gift. The gesture has a

52

tremendous effect on him, and he repays her thoughtfulness by giving her his
dead granddaughter’s piano. Overcome at his generosity, the painfully shy Beth
goes immediately to Mr. Laurence’s house to express her gratitude. The scene is
a classic moment in ﬁlm family-making.

In a long shot, the audience sees Mr. Laurence seated with his back to the
door reading a newspaper. Beth comes through the door and comes forward at
his gruff-sounding “Come in.” A5 Beth comes closer, the camera also pulls in
until Beth and Mr. Laurence ﬁll the screen, Beth having kissed the old man on the
cheek and he having pulled her into his lap. The scene is as close to a quote
from the book as is possible:

I came to thank you, sir, for...” But she didn't ﬁnish, for he looked so
friendly that she forgot her speech and, only remembering that he
had lost the little girl he loved, she put both arms round his neck
and kissed him.

If the roof of the house had suddenly ﬂown off, the old
gentleman wouldn’t have been more astonished. But he liked it. Oh,
dear, yes, he liked it amazingly! And was so touched and pleased
by that confiding little kiss that all his crustiness vanished, and he
just set her on his knee, and laid his wrinkled cheek against her
rosy one, feeling as if he had got his own little granddaughter back
again. (65)

In the novel it is clear that part of Mr. Laurence’s hard-heartedness was

due to his having lost his daughter to a man he deemed unsuitable, and part was

53

due to the loss of his grandchild. Beth, having entered the house, transformed it
into a home again, something Jo was not quite innocent enough to do and that
Laurie was too old to do. The notion of the redemptive child was not a new one;
Jane Tompkins discusses Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva; the saintly child
who is “naturally" good and whose inﬂuence is effective on all but the most
determinedly wrong-headed, and who must die because she is too good for this
world (129). Like her literary predecessor, Beth seems to have a natural
goodness; and, also like Eva, she is too good for this world and is dead near the
middle of the story. There is a noteworthy difference, though. Beth actually
complains, albeit mildly, on occasion. She also actively does good, something
that Eva is too young and too frail to do. This agency makes Beth a more fully
developed character than Eva; its depiction also makes the story more realistic.
As is true for so many domestic/sentimental novels of the nineteenth century,
Little Women is part morality tale and part realist fiction, and realistic portrayal of
at least some aspects of everyday life could only make readers believe more
completely in the characters who were somewhat like themselves. In like
manner, the film shows Beth acting on her world in a relatively realistic manner.
She is someone the audience can identify with.
According to Alex Neill:

achieving ‘internal understanding’ of another, be she a ﬁctional

character or an actual person, requires that I imagine the world, or

the situation that she is in, from her point of view. She becomes the

‘protagonist’ of an imaginative project, a project in which I represent

54

to myself her thoughts, beliefs, desires, feelings, and so on g

th_oggh they were my own. (185 emphasis in original).
Much of this internal understanding, or empathic response, is evoked in the ﬁlm
version through scenes like the one described above. Identiﬁcation with the
characters on screen is an important part of reading a ﬁlm, and although the
movie focuses more on Jo’s development than on the other girls’, scenes that
feature the other girls offer alternative models with which to identify, thus
expanding the audience appeal of the ﬁlm.

Consider Amy’s trip to Europe. She was making the trip not because she
was wealthy enough to afford it, but because Aunt March wanted a reasonably
reﬁned companion. Amy’s qualiﬁcations were sufﬁcient middle-class gentility and
a willingness to be pleasant to an old lady. Any girl with a middle-class
background could envision herself in such a role, and any girl with aspirations to
middle-class status could perceive this as a model for both appropriate behavior
and for the rewards of meeting middle-class expectations. The lesson of Amy’s
getting the trip instead of Jo is not as apparent in the ﬁlm as in the novel. Jo is,
naturally enough, distressed that Amy is going in her place, but the moral of the
vignette — that bad temper such as Jo is prone to can make one lose things one
desires — is not completely clear. Instead the change in companions seems more
a caprice of Aunt March’s than a difﬁcult lesson that Jo learns. Still, the notion
that good behavior (i.e., middle-class gentility) can net rewards pervades the
atmosphere, perhaps a sufﬁcient message for an audience faced daily with the

reality of bread lines and soup kitchens. Amy’s gratitude for the opportunity

55

redeems her earlier materialistic behaviors/attitudes, establishing her later right
to land a wealthy husband for the right reason - because she loves him rather
than because she craves wealth.

Meg’s life choice is even more “realistic” and attainable than Amy’s; Meg
marries the poor but honest tutor purely because she loves him. Her decision is
rewarded with a comfortable clone of the life she knew at home. She lives in a
sweet little cottage (something that is never shown in the ﬁlm) and has, almost
immediately, twin babies to ﬁll out her home and her life. The joys and
tribulations of the newlywed life are described in some detail in the novel, but
little of this is presented in the ﬁlm. What is added to the ﬁlm, though, is Meg’s
opportunity, as the young and newly wise matron, to counsel Jo through some of
her sorrow over Beth’s death and to forewarn her that Amy may well come home
engaged, if not married to, Laurie. But Meg is a little late with the intelligence,
since Jo, reading between the lines of Amy’s letters home, has already divined
the budding romance. Jo is philosophical about her situation as a single woman,
and Meg is presented as a woman to be envied since she is securely married
and has therefore acquired the status and respect due a person in her position.

Jo’s adventure in New York offers a somewhat different character type to
relate to. Having obtained permission to leave the family nest, and having the
security of her position as nanny/teacher to Mrs. Kirke’s children, Jo is free to
pursue her literary goals. She needn’t worry about housing or food, both of which
come with her job, so she can spend her free time writing; and she has free time

because there are servants to attend to the daily drudgery of cooking and

56

cleaning. She writes for the popular press, and is pleased that she can make
money to send home. In the most genteel manner imaginable, Jo is a single,
career-woman on her own in the big city, and she is successful. The message
would not have been lost on audiences: Working in the city is as honorable as
working in a small town or on the family farm and single women can succeed just
as readily as single men. Although there was considerable concern during the
19305 about women taking jobs away from men, a single woman doing the
woman’s work of caring for children would not have been a particularly
threatening image. Even married women could relate to Jo’s work with children
as well as her drive to be ﬁnancially independent. Self-sufﬁciency thus proves a
virtue for women, a bit of ﬁlm reassurance for married women who found
themselves breadwinners when their husbands were out of work and also for
single women who needed to support themselves or help support their families.
Jo combines independence with being an artist, and at the same time is
responsible for children, a most enviable combination of traits sure to appeal to
women with ambition or simply a need for income who also had family
responsibilities.

Because of her somewhat atypical behavior and her apparent disinterest
in landing a husband, Jo is the pivotal character of this ﬁlm. One of her functions
is to reinforce for the audience the value of virtue. This particular function,
however, gets a powerful overlay of patriarchal authority absent from the novel.
In both ﬁlm and novel, Jo chooses to give up writing for the sensational press

because Professor Bhaer shows her how bad it is. In the ﬁlm, she asks his

57

opinion of her writing and he lectures her about misusing her talent. Ashamed
that her friend thinks badly of her, she renounces writing altogether, until she
feels she can write something worthier. However, in the novel Jo’s decision is
only indirectly inﬂuenced by the professor. She doesn’t seek his opinion, but she
learns how he feels during a conversation about one of the sensational
newspapers he ﬁnds in the parlor. Professor Bhaer declares the contents to be
damaging to readers who don’t recognize that artiﬁcial characters and stories
with their lost fortunes and heiresses and murders and poisonings do not build
good “inner“ persons. Jo is relieved that he doesn’t know that she is responsible
for some of those stories (although the reader is made to understand that he
suspects what kind of writing she has done), and in a bit of private soul-searching
reaches her decision to quit writing until she can write about something worthy,
that is, uplifting for readers. What Alcott had originally made an interior incident
dependent on Jo’s own good character and good sense is changed in the ﬁlm
into an opportunity for the audience to see that a woman needs a man to keep
her headed in the right direction.

At least some readings of Qttle Women identify the story as determinedly
patriarchal, and there is no doubt that Father is a key player in the novel, whether
he is physically present or not. This centrality is somewhat less obvious in the
ﬁlm. Certainly, the mise-en-scene and resolutions that follow the reading of the
Christmas letter from Father bespeak a household under patriarchal sway.
However, once the scene is ﬁnished, there is virtually no mention of him until

Marmee goes to Washington to nurse him in the hospital. When he ﬁnally is able

58

to return home, he is affectionately welcomed and then kept around to dress a
scene now and then; and even then, he is not always present. After Beth’s
illness, when Jo wants to go away to New York, Marmee agrees to discuss it with
Father — a discussion we never see. Nor is he present when Jo actually leaves.
The only active thing he does is ofﬁciate at Meg’s wedding to John. (Interestingly,
this speciﬁcally church-related function, performed by an ordained clergyman, is
placed outside of the “church home” in the garden, rather than in the parlor
where Alcott placed it.)

Oddly, this “passive actor” is vital to the construction of the March home,
especially in its ﬁlm incarnation. He is legitimately unemployed, as were so many
men in 1933, yet he retained his status as head of the household, a point that is
unlikely to have been missed by the audience. At a time when the middle class
faced the possible (and sometimes actual) disruption of their homes, a stable,
genteel-ly poor home would surely have been a reassuring sight. Not only was
Father legitimately unemployed, but also the women of the household were
depicted as legitimately employed. Of course, when he returned home, the
implication was clear, but never stated, that Marmee would no longer need to go
out to work because Father was ready to re-assume his role. Also, once the war
was over, Marmee’s job was eliminated. And the girls each solved their
employment woes in other ways — Meg through marriage to Mr. Brooke, Amy
with a trip to Europe compliments of Aunt March and subsequent marriage to

Laurie, and Jo with her governess position in New York.

59

As noted in chapter 1, when Alcott wrote Little Women, massive social
change was underway in the US. The Civil War was only four years in the past
and Reconstruction was still in process, masses of immigrants were
concentrated in urban areas where they needed to be “Americanized,” and
industrialization had created a working class unlike any that had previously
existed in North America. Especially in Northern cities, immigration and
industrialization created social change on a scale almost as extensive as the
changes caused by war. Urban crime, city sanitation, living conditions for the
poor, immigrant ghettoes, in other words, the quality of life in the city, became a
major concern; and the middle and upper classes had a vested interest in
correcting these urban problems.3 Particularly the newly emerging middle class
sought to strengthen its sometimes tenuous class position. As the self-
proclaimed arbiters of taste and morality (Stansell 66), and abetted by clergy who
were learning under duress to market themselves (Douglas 117), women (and
men) of the middle class undertook to correct the problems created by social
change, and one of the most pressing was maintaining the class standing and
the sanctity of the middle-class home (Ginzburg 211-2; May 4-5).

The boundaries deﬁning home and family became, perhaps inevitably,
much less permeable than they had been in earlier times, but in a dichotomous
fashion. Removing production from the home effectively removed women from
the workplace, at least insofar as that involved gainful employment. Instead,

women became consumers of goods, who went out to shop in order to be able to

 

3 Christine Stansell’s study of New York City epitomizes the kinds of problems endemic to most
Northern cities that were feeling the effects of industrialization and immigration.

6O

supply her family’s needs and create the physical reality of the home sanctuary
(Blumin 191 ). The home became the place to escape the stresses of the world
outside, and the woman in it the became responsible for seeing that it functioned
as that sanctuary; but she was also the one who had to go out into the
marketplace to acquire the goods no longer produced at home. This constant
crossing of the boundary between the inside and the outside of the home often
made it difﬁcult to maintain the physical distinction between the two, something
which undoubtedly contributed to the development of relatively elaborate social
rituals such as formal calling and sending tradespeople to the back of the house
to make their deliveries. The ideology of the private nuclear family home grew out
of social changes such as these. Serving as a buffer against the vagaries of life
in a world whose most salient feature was its instability, the home boundary
became the first (and last) line of defense against outside world.

In the 19305, home boundaries were again a concern. Many families were
forced to share housing, sometimes with their married children sometimes with
unrelated persons or families (Wecter 29). A ﬁlm like Little Women declared
visually that the ideal of the private family home was alive and well despite the
economic realities of the period. It didn’t matter that many families could not
achieve the ideal; what mattered was that families could believe in the ideal,
could believe that the depiction showed how life sho_ulg be, no matter what it was
like in actuality. The ideal remained the independent, private family home.

Books and ﬁlms such as Little Women served a reinforcing function in

maintaining this ideal. They presented plausible scenarios of middle-class life

61

(even if that middle class was currently living in genteel poverty) along with just a
touch of what might happen if something unusual chanced on the scene. Thus an
Amy could marry the wealthy neighbor next door, and a Jo could write a first
novel that proved immediately successful. Meanwhile, readers were given a
treatise on proper behavior for women, that key to a proper home life. Having
been ensconced as the angels of the house, women young and old were
reminded in chapter after chapter that they had a special role in maintaining and
reproducing this private family space. They were responsible for the moral
atmosphere of the home and for its correct function, and all of this was reinforced
inmeMm.

By 1933 the immigrant question had been settled thanks to the quota
system. Industrialization was also “under control.” Although concerns over
immigration and industrialization were relatively hidden in the novel, in the ﬁlm
they were effectively made non-issues. Industrialization had become a normal
part of the urban landscape, and immigration was being managed. However, on
the personal level, the primary social problem was the economic crisis. One
result of the crisis was that multiple generations were forced to share housing,
and according to Stephanie Coontz, it wasn’t a happy necessity; rather these
“reinforced extended family ties . . .were experienced by most people as
stultifying and oppressive” (26). One method for dealing with these difﬁculties
was consuming popular entertainment. Comic strips such as M, for
example, depicted young families living on their own, usually without beneﬁt of

parental assistance and usually without grandparents in evidence. The extended

62

family disappeared from many popular expressions, and this was true for Li_t1l_e
W as a novel and on ﬁlm. What was not always possible in real life could be
experienced vicariously. Women could work ‘freely’; the private home was
private; the middle-class ideology of the private family could prove itself
workable, even though it was nearly impossible for much of the population, under
depression conditions, to achieve these things.

One thing that the ﬁlm depicts, sympathetically to be sure, is class
difference. The difference between the March home and the Laurence mansion,
or even Aunt March’s upper middle-class home, speaks volumes to the disparity
between the wealthy and everyone else. That the relations between these social
groups was depicted as amicable speaks to the American ideology of equality
and, perhaps, to the desire to minimize the real class differences apparent in real
life. The March household embodied what was truly desirable in a home
atmosphere: close family ties, a solid grounding in the Christian faith, the
freedom for family members to be themselves, sanctuary from the outside world.
Part of the message, more evident on film than in the novel, was that, unless the
wealthy exhibited these characteristics, they were personally bankrupt no matter
how much money they had. The ﬁlm also depicted the working class as part of
this continuum, although somewhat less sympathetically than it depicted the
“better” classes. The maid at Mrs. Kirke’s boarding house reads the M,
where Jo publishes her sensational stories, as if it were high art. She also speaks
with an unreﬁned nasal quality, the New York equivalent of a Cockney accent.

However, she is clean and neat and, therefore, acceptable as a housemaid in

63

this middle-class boarding house. So even though class differences were
acknowledged and, in the case of the working class, magniﬁed in the ﬁlm, there
were no real boundaries between the classes evident. No one need envy anyone
else, and all can live in harmony.

The ﬁnal set of scenes in the 1933 ﬁlm ﬁnds the entire (extended) family
reunited. Meg and John are visiting Marmee and Father with the twins when Amy
and her new husband, Laurie, arrive with Aunt March and Mr. Laurence.

Hannah, the ever-faithful family retainer, is on hand to fuss about feeding
everyone. Jo is napping in her garret when they all arrive, and it takes Laurie’s
presence to awaken her. This scene is an interesting twist on the sleeping beauty
story. Laurie at ﬁrst just watches Jo sleep and his mere presence is enough to
rouse her. But there is no romantic kiss, just the chaste embrace of “brother and
sister” as Jo explains to Laurie that she knew all along that he and Amy were
meant for each other. Jo having thus settled the family mantle on his shoulders,
the two of them join the rest of the relatives downstairs. Jo gives Amy the sister-
to-sister version of what she just told Laurie, and all is love and light at home.

The only person missing is Beth, but the screenwriters work that one out
in the last of the “home church” scenes. Jo is overwhelmed with joy at having the
family reconstructed in the homey March parlor, but in her typically independent
manner, she doesn’t want to display her emotions in front of everyone. Instead
she slips around a corner into the hall and leans against the wall. Clasping her
hands together as if in prayer, she lifts her face heavenward and whispers her

gratitude to Bethie that the family is all together again. The saintly sister, who had

64

learned her angel of the house role so well that she had to die, is now a direct
connection between heaven and the March house. Jo’s theme plays, hymn-like,
in the background. However, this gathering of the clan is not quite complete
because Jo has yet to be paired off with her soulmate. Nevertheless, the stage is
set for the ﬁnal addition to the household, Professor Bhaer, who will help
complete the family circle.

When the Professor comes to the door and sees all the people in the
parlor, he leaves Jo’s book with Hannah and beats a hasty retreat, hesitant to
intrude on Jo’s company. This melodramatic “near miss” is such a staple of ﬁlm
language that the audience hardly bothers to hold its collective breath. Despite
the fact that Jo has left the house and the Professor is headed down the road
alone, their meeting is so certain that it comes as no surprise. Aside from the
ﬁlm’s setup, there is the reader’s knowledge that in the novel Jo and the
Professor do marry. What would have been a surprise, a disappointment, and an
occasion for audience outcry, would have been for the meeting not to happen.
This was never a likely twist for the screenwriters to introduce. Instead they
include a moment of commitment and a last laugh to close the ﬁlm.

The moment of commitment is quoted from the novel (and repeated in
later ﬁlm versions). The professor asks Jo to marry him, all the while proclaiming
his shortcomings, both social and ﬁnancial. Jo, of course, is too good a person to
be concerned with anything but his personal characteristics, and those are
impeccable. When he says that all he really has to offer is a full heart and empty

hands, Jo’s response is to put her hands in his and say “Not empty now.” The

65

one thing not in the script that is in the novel is that Jo actually kisses the
Professor, a surprising omission in a romantic ﬁlm — except that it makes the
romance seem sweeter and more old-fashioned. In this instance, the ﬁlm is more
“sentimental” than the novel. Nevertheless, the Professor is sufﬁciently overcome
by her enthusiastic response that he provides one last bit of comic relief by
forgetting to close his umbrella on the way into the house, so that it turns inside
out while he and Jo go in to tell the family their news. This scene performs a
number of tasks necessary to a satisfying denouement.

First, it provides a clear statement about the importance of women getting
married (particularly to the right man). No matter how happy Jo claimed to be
now that the family was back together, she was decidedly m_o_r_e than happy once
she knew that Fritz Bhaer loved her enough to want to make her Mrs. Bhaer.
Second, it demonstrates that even the best man needs a woman to look after
him, as evidenced by his absentmindedness about the umbrella. Third, it
reinforces the importance of maintaining the sanctity of the home. The Professor
would have been treated graciously had he come in earlier when Hannah invited
him, but he would have been an outsider, no matter how good a friend to Jo he
was. Coming in as Jo’s afﬁanced, however, meant coming into the family as
My part of the family.

Not only is the family circle complete now, the ﬁlm itself comes full circle.
After the ﬁnal scene the theme music plays into a ﬁnal still of the avenue of oaks
leading to the comfortable home. Now the season is spring, just as it is in the

movie; the music is back in major, and the still fades into the ﬁnal cast list. The

66

ﬁnal sequence recapitulates the nineteenth-century ideology incorporated in the
film. The foundation for a good and happy life is the nuclear family home, which
foundation will inevitably lead to other happy nuclear family homes. The
concomitant messages - that women are responsible for the home and thus
should center their energies there; that the home should be a haven for family
members, especially the men who support the home; that a woman can
contribute to her family’s support without threatening her husband’s authority —
reinforce ideas established in the nineteenth century but in twentieth-century

guise.

67

Chapter 3

Once More, Into the Breach

Only sixteen years after the RKO version of the movie garnered the
Cannes Film Festival best actress award for Katharine Hepburn for her portrayal
of Jo, MGM did a remake produced and directed by Mervyn LeRoy. The script
was a virtual clone of the earlier version, with only minor changes made by
Andrew Solt, in collaboration with Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman who had
written the original screenplay. However, those minor changes made a significant
difference in what the story was saying. Where the earlier ﬁlm depicted
essentially independent, self-reliant women (young and old), the later one played
on the youth of the girls and their need for guidance from Marmee who was in
turn guided by Father. The 1933 version portrayed strong women who were not
averse to male inﬂuence but who were also quite capable of functioning without
it. The 1949 version, however, was awash in the return to home and hearth
characteristic of post-World War II America and the early days of the Cold War, a
return that was marked by a revived patriarchy as well as the return of the
soldiers who had been away fighting or occupying enemy territory.

Although the script was essentially cloned for this remake, the cast was
not. Not only did they not resemble the earlier cast — with the exception of Mr.
Laurence — they also did not resemble the descriptions in the novel. Instead, it
seems that MGM was more concerned with star power. In this ﬁlm, Jo is played

by June Allyson, Marmee by Mary Astor, Meg by Janet Leigh, Amy by Elizabeth

68

Taylor (in a blond wig), Beth by Margaret O’Brien, and Laurie by Peter Lawford.
Mr. Laurence was played by Sir C. Aubrey Smith, and Ro‘ssano Brazzi, an Italian,
played the German Professor Bhaer. Casting for this ﬁlm resulted in a voluptuous
Amy who looked older than Beth, a Marmee who was so self-assured that she
was almost smug in her wisdom, and a Jo who was diminutive but spunky.
Physically she looked nothing like the tall, gangly Jo of the novel and the earlier
ﬁlm although she did display the sort of intense spirit associated with Jo.

Color ﬁlming was still a relatively expensive proposition in 1949, and its
use was associated with grand epics such as Gone With the WM or with lavish
musical productions such as The Wizard of 0;. Little Women was neither, but it
did boast a star-studded cast worth the expense. Certainly color film was meant
to increase public interest in the ﬁlm, adding to the visual value of the commodity.
The interior scenes were particularly enhanced by color, where the sets,
costumes, makeup, and lighting could be carefully controlled for effect. For
example, much of the visual (and, therefore, psychic) appeal of the March parlor
derives from its inviting colors and the way that the characters’ costumes fit into
the décor. The Society of Motion Picture Technicians and Engineers guidelines
that Mary Beth Haralovich discusses, note that “the femaLe lead has grimacy in
color planning” (64 emphasis in original). In this case ﬁve female leads must be
accommodated at various times throughout the ﬁlm. Color is especially effective
when they are all in the same scene because the color coordination contributes

to the sense of unity and solidarity the women share with each other.

69

Additionally, Haralovich notes, “color shoul_d contrib_ute to unobtrusive
m” (63 emphasis in original). This does work in the interior scenes, but the
exterior scenes were not so well-served because, for the most part, they were
ﬁlmed on sound stages with painted backdrops and potted plants and trees. The
background in the exterior scenes generally looked as false and ﬂat as it was,
imparting something of the sense of watching a stage play rather than a ﬁlm (a
nearly inevitable consequence of ﬁlming outdoor scenes in color on a sound
stage). However, by 1949, ﬁlm acting no longer relied on the mannerisms of the
stage that had permeated Hepbum’s performance in 1933. Dramatic poses,
exaggerated dialogue, and sweeping motion had been replaced with close-ups
and conversational exchanges intended to add to the realism of the ﬁlm.

This more realistic acting style meant that even though the household
depicted was idealized, the Marches could, nevertheless, be experienced as a
normal family dealing with normal family concerns. Each of the women, “big” as
well as “little,” was revealed more by way of her spoken words and her actions,
than by melodramatic poses. The modest home was old-fashioned but
comfortable in a manner reminiscent of what grandmother’s house was
supposed to have been like. The tight-bodiced, full-skirted dresses played as
romantic accompaniments rather than encumbrances, although they did retain
some of their constraining characteristics, preventing Jo from playing boy’s
games (but not from being able to run as well as, or better than, a boy). Each of
these elements helped make the antique story fit the modern sensibilities of

1949. After the somewhat Spartan clothing women had worn during the war

70

years, softer looking clothes with full skirts and ﬁtted bodices were making a
comeback. In women’s magazines of the late forties, women were depicted as
comfortably settled in comfortably furnished homes, just as the Marches had
been in the late 18605. Direct, straightforward communication — provided it was
delivered politely - was expected from women as well as from men. In this ﬁlm
version of the story, apparently, 1868 was just like 1949 but without electricity
and with long skirts.

The ﬁlm opens with the same theme music as the 1933 version; the music
is played, however, more in the big band style of the 19405 than the music hall
style of 1933. The result is a tune a person could dance to, perhaps with one of
the March sisters. Credits this time run against a cross-stitched sampler still of
the little women outdoors. Instead of a picture that immediately evokes thoughts
of the secure family home as in the earlier ﬁlm, this still focuses on the girl-
women, presenting them as wholesome, old-fashioned, all-American girls -the
sort that any lucky man would be happy to have as wife and mother in his own
home. Color serves to idealize this picture, adding to the romantic possibilities for
the audience as well as the girls.

In this version of the story, as in the 1933 version, the screenwriters make
full use of the episodic nature of the novel, freely mixing and matching scenes to
suit their narrative needs. Indeed, the episodes themselves seem to provide
some of the cutting for this story; once a scene is completed, the story can pick
up nearly anywhere without disrupting the narrative. Nevertheless, the narrative

manages to maintain much of its faithfulness to the book by way of the dialogue

71

lifted from the book, period-appropriate costuming, and visual references to such
things as the illustrated newspaper to which Jo sold her ﬁrst story. One odd result
of playing on the episodic elements in the original text is that this ﬁlm version
mimics the format of the Hollywood musical: virtually every scene could serve as
the setup for a song and dance number. Indeed, there is almost a sense of regret
at the end of some scenes that there is no such display.

In 1949 the US was in a fairly comfortable situation. The woes of the
Depression had been cured by the economic boost of arming for WW II, most of
the soldiers were back home, and the baby boom was well under way. The single
world threat was our former ally, the USSR, and to read the propaganda of the
era, the best defense against that threat was the all-American home. Liﬁlg
Wm, fresh-faced, straightforward, and out for nothing but good, served as the
ideal prototype for that home. Only minor changes to the 1933 screenplay
transformed that tale of independence, female independence in particular, into a
tale of home retreat (removing this ﬁlm version even further from the subtexts in
the novel than the earlier ﬁlm had been) creating a very neatly “contained” story.
Alan Nadel’s reﬂections on the post-war years, Containment CM, outlines
myriad ways that Americans withdrew into the conﬁnes of their homes, and %
W’s focus on the nineteenth-century version of the private, middle-class
household was a perfect vehicle for reinforcing the wisdom of such a retreat.

Indeed, the interior scenes in the March home were set up to reinforce the idea

that the most important things in life could only happen at home.

72

The minor changes to the original screenplay noted above included one
that was especially effective in this regard. As few scenes as possible take place
outside the March home. The few that do are included as much for the contrast
they provide to the atmosphere of that worthy establishment as for the
development of various plot lines. The scenes are also clearly focused to insure
that the characters retain their solid grounding in the home. The suburban setting
of the original story also helps reinforce the modern sense of the importance of
the private middle-class home, a sense that was evident in “the justiﬁcation for
the postwar housing boom [that] was part of a one-dimensional frame of mind
that stressed the possibility of creating the perfect society” (Clark 171 ). In the late
19405 and early 19505, many new subdivisions were being developed, well away
from urban centers; that distance was reﬂected in the ﬁlm and treated as a most
desirable way of life.

Signiﬁcantly, the audience never sees Marmee at work, providing aid and
comfort to soldiers and their families. Her work is only indirectly addressed in the
novel, but the 1933 screenplay showed Marmee at her job. Not only could she
distribute goods, but she was also able to provide much needed cash to an old
man in need. This demonstrated her “ability to act, to act as an individual, to have
an impact on others in what the nineteenth century called the public — by which it
meant white male - sphere” (Harris 273). Harris deﬁnes this ability to act as
power, and by 1949 power had been effectively restored to the white males who
had come home after the war. So Marmee is not connected with the world

beyond the home by showing her in the public sphere. Instead, at the beginning

73

of this ﬁlm version, all the girls but Jo are at home waiting for Marmee, just as
they are in the novel. In a single stroke the ﬁlm is made more true to the novel at
the same time that it subverts the notion of female empowerment the novel
presents. Similarly, rather than showing Jo at work in Aunt March’s house, the
audience sees her ﬁrst as she returns home from an ice skating outing. These
two moves help to center the action of the ﬁlm immediately in the home, a focus
of the novel that does not come across as clearly in the earlier ﬁlm. In this
version, Jo has not yet begun her employment as Aunt March’s companion and
so is still a carefree late adolescent free to entertain herself in the afternoon. This
break with the novel helps establish the girls and women as home-focused with,
apparently, little interest in the world outside.

As in the earlier ﬁlm, instead of walking through the gate, Jo tries to jump
the fence and falls flat on the ground. Her pratfall makes the girls laugh, even
prim Meg, and that is all the challenge Jo needs to go out through the gate and
attempt the jump again, this time successfully. Once inside, Jo is again chided for
not behaving like a lady.

While June Allyson’s Jo responds the same way Jo did in the earlier film,
her performance lacks the fervor of Hepburn’s and instead suggests irritation or
the petulance of an adolescent girl who is not ready to quit being a child but who
nevertheless wants to be an adult rather than the desire to somehow break out of
the social constraints of her class and gender position. This is the ﬁrst place
where Jo’s character on screen diverges from Jo’s character in the novel, despite

the fact that the screenplay here is identical to the 1933 original. 'Two reasons for

74

this change are apparent. First, Jo is being played by an all-American girl-next-
door type, the sort in the late 405 and early 505 who could play softball in the
afternoon and serve cocktails at seven. Second, the director plays on the vision
of women promoted after the second world war as well-rounded, selfless, and
committed to domesticity. Jo’s discontent ﬁt quite readily with what Eva
Moskowitz terms “a discourse of discontent” evident in women’s magazines
between 1945 and 1965 (67). While women were supposed to ﬁnd complete
fulﬁllment at home, the magazines Moskowitz examines ”documented on an
unprecedented scale the difﬁculty women had in ﬁnding satisfaction in their
homes and personal lives” (78). Jo could easily be perceived as ﬁguring this
domestic discontent, despite her supposed youth in the ﬁlm. Nevertheless, she
manages ﬁnd the solution to her problems within her home and family. Allyson’s
Jo is played as a thoroughly charming, all-American young woman who displays
none of the overlay of gentility or awareness of class position that Hepburn’s Jo
evoked.

With the girls all gathered in the parlor, the interaction among them begins
exactly as it does in the novel and in the earlier ﬁlm - at home complaining about
there being no presents to make this Christmas a real Christmas. The scene
continues with the rehearsal for Jo’s play and Marmee’s return with the letter
from Father. Here the screenplay takes an interesting twist. The girls all gather
around Marmee’s chair to hear the letter, but the activity is interrupted by Aunt ,
March’s arrival with Christmas money for the girls. In a ﬂurry of consumer-driven

desire, the girls obtain permission from Marmee to go off at once to the store to

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buy themselves Christmas gifts. The scene closes on the open letter lying on the
arm of the chair, unread and forgotten. That the letter is unread makes Father’s
presence almost palpable; he is present In spirit, ready to guide his family, and
they have all dispersed, intent on their own selﬁsh desires.

When they return and the presents are all laid out under the tree, the girls
finally gather around Marmee, again in the signature mise-en-scéne, to hear
what Father has to say. This time there are no tearful resolutions spoken.
Instead, each of the girls reﬂects silently on the missive, a reﬂection that is more
pointed because Marmee is called away at that point to provide charity to the
Hummels. One by one the girls pick up their gifts, resolved to exchange them for
gifts for Marmee. They have internalized the message from Father and observed
Marmee’s exemplary behavior; thus they are able to overcome themselves
enough to be selﬂess, part of the “true” meaning of Christmas that they had
momentarily forgotten. All it took was Father’s admonition rather than Mother’s
permission to make clear what they needed to do. As in the 1933 ﬁlm, “it is the
spirit of the absent father that is evoked as the basis for all activity” (Kuntz 989).
When Marmee returns later that evening and finds their gifts for her under the
tree, she is appropriately touched, satisﬁed that her girls have demonstrated their
ability to behave as good women should.

For all the motherliness that Mary Astor exudes as Marmee, it is a
pragmatic, almost self-absorbed, motherliness, one that is as self-satisﬁed as it is
satisﬁed in her children’s behavior. This portrayal of Marmee is more accurate

than that in the earlier ﬁlm in that it is more akin to the kind of portrayal of women

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in domestic/sentimental novels which Joyce Warren discusses. These novels
stress the importance of women and their place in the home and in them “[tjhe
concerns of women are portrayed as positive and redeﬁned from a new
perspective, where they are not seen as triﬂes at all but as important instances of
human involvement and moral power” (7). Woman’s werk was effectively
“professionalized,” as an endeavor requiring skill, intellect, and training, even as
it was circumscribed by domestic concerns.

The early Cold War version of wife and mother bears a striking
resemblance to the nineteenth-century True Woman, one reason that Mary
Astor’s Marmee is so similar to the one in the novel. In her analysis of
nineteenth-century women’s periodicals and gift books, Barbara Welter says
“[t]he attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was
judged by her husband, her neighbors and society could be divided into four
cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all
together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman” (152). This is
the kind of woman Astor portrayed in the ﬁlm, and this is the kind of womanliness
promoted by woman’s magazines of the 19405. The 1949 Little Women
promoted the same sort of ideology other elements of the culture promoted, and
that ideology was simply the mid-twentieth century version of True Womanhood,
the foundation for the private nuclear family. While “magazines normalized their
readers’ feelings of discontent” (Moskowitz 69) with some of the restrictiveness of
suburban living, marriage counseling columns also served to reinforce and report

experts’ successful efforts to “impos[e] domestic ideology on their female clients”

77

(84). Astor’s Marmee balanced the discontents with the ideology and proceeded
to encourage her daughters to do the same.

In the next sequence of the ﬁlm, the girls come down for Christmas
breakfast and Marmee has already gone on a mission of mercy, having given up
her own breakfast for the Hummels. She has left instructions for the girls to have
breakfast and then go to church. This last instruction is a signiﬁcant, although
apparently minor, change from both the novel and the earlier ﬁlm. In both earlier
versions of the story, the few church-like activities described take place at home,
a part of the nineteenth-century “home church” described in chapter 2. However,
in 1949 the USSR was being characterized in the US as a nation of “godless
Communists,” and good religious training had come to be recognized as a part of
the strength of character of the American people. The Christianity of the post-war
era was treated as a political force as much as a spiritual one and thus had to be
institutionalized in a way that had not been me before.

This re-institutionalization of religion was in keeping with a national culture
that had retreated into the private family home while paying homage to experts -
religious, psychological, economic, academic, political — who were supposed to
have the answers that even the best household could not manage alone,
answers about how to handle the modern era, about how to train children for an
uncertain nuclear-Ized future, about how to tell whether the new neighbor was a
communist spy. The Church (in all its denominational guises), long a bastion of
dogmatic truth, was the natural place to turn to for comfort and guidance. That

meant taking worship out of the home and making it a conscientious citizen’s

78

duty to take part in the private/public hybrid of the church service. Of course, the
novel offered no real foundation for such behavior, thus the admonition to “go to
church” and the subsequent justiﬁcation for failing to do 50. Here the nineteenth-
century concern with good Christian formation acquires mid-twentieth century
garb, a representation that allows for active Christianity while avoiding
addressing doctrinal concerns - exactly as nineteenth-century home-focused
religion did.

Despite the signiﬁcance of the admonition to attend church, the audience
never sees the girls in church. Instead, they do the me Christian thing of giving
up their breakfast for the Hummels, as Marmee had. This accomplishes two
things. First, the screenwriters do not need to create a generic church scene that
might be read as favoring one or another denomination, something that would
point up differences rather than national unity. Second, the girls’ behavior
demonstrates that the strength of the Christian US is its willingness to treat
others in a Christian manner, something that was probably not lost on an
audience that was also reading and hearing about US efforts to assist Europe in
rebuilding after the war. Ultimately, the message brings nineteenth-century
sensibilities into the twentieth century: women can do as much from home (i.e.,
provide practical assistance to the poor) to improve the world situation as
politicians and statesm can. The difference is that what the women do is
personalized and, therefore, more obviously and immediately effective.

The fact that the poor family the Marches were helping happened to be

German is something else that would not have been lost on a 1949 audience.

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That they were poor and suffering from cold and hunger was not much different
from the conditions many Germans in Europe were experiencing. In their
weakened and relatively helpless condition, they were no longer a threat but
were rather objects of pity. The Hummels served admirably as this pitiable trope,
one that was so ineffectual that the ministrations of women and girls were
sufﬁcient to manage it. Amy’s (Elizabeth Taylor) feeding bits of popover to the
Hummel children gave the visit a comic twist; the children sat in row, like so
many hungry fledglings, while Amy broke off bits of the popovers and popped
them into their open mouths. While charming on one level, this image could only
have helped to reinforce the idea that the Germans were a defeated, subject
people. Even Beth’s tender cradling of the newborn, which clearly demonstrated
proper maternal instinct and behavior, was also a statement of power: Mrs.
Hummel was too weak to hold the child. One is left wondering who cared for the
baby once the Marches left. The German immigrants Alcott depicted are here
transformed into harmless, ineffectual people who need be of no serious concern
to true Americans. Immigrants and immigration have ceased to be an issue.
Despite these home-focused, self-contained episodes, the ﬁlm
concentrates as much on Jo’s journey of self-discovery, her search for her
unique place in the word, as it does on home and hearth. She turns down
Laurie’s marriage proposal, goes to New York to improve her writing, and later,
as a means of therapeutic grief management, writes her masterpiece novel, a
story about the too-early death of a too-sweet sister. Despite the individualistic

character of these activities, they fail, in this instance, to ratify the notion of

80

female empowerment many critics have read into the novel. Each incident does
serve as a part of Jo’s self-discovery, but that self-discovery ends by ﬁrmly
situating her within the conventional frame of woman in love and about to marry.
First among these is her rather implausible rejection of Laurie’s marriage
proposal.

Even in the novel, this decision is rather puzzling, unless it i_s_ read as Jo’s
stand for female independence. Otherwise it becomes a somewhat clumsy plot
twist, albeit one that must remain in the ﬁlm unless the screenwriters choose to
rewrite a major theme from the novel. Jo and Laurie have been as close as
friends can be, sharing good times, hopes, and dreams with each other. Only
child Laurie has been adopted into the March family circle, reconstituting for
himself his own lost family. All of this is made possible by Jo’s impetuous
decision to get to know him and thus acquire for herself a boy to play with. Jo’s
actions might best be seen as a mild sort of adolescent rebellion, her desire to
put off as long as possible the responsibilities of adult womanhood. With Laurie
for a friend, she can romp in a much less ladylike fashion than playing with her
sisters generally allows. Laurie becomes for her a surrogate brother. But for
Laurie there is more to the relationship than familial restoration; he develops
feelings for Jo that she, incredibly, doesn’t notice or chooses to ignore until the
fateful day of the proposal.

Her refusal (tearful because she knows she is hurting Laurie) functions as
an additional instance of adolescent rebellion. She has already expressed her

unhappiness over the way that Meg’s marriage has broken up her happy

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childhood family. Now she has the opportunity to develop a family of her own and
chooses not to, claiming that she doesn’t love Laurie the way a wife should love
a husband and adding that she doesn’t ever expect to marry. Although she is
unhappy that Meg will be moving away from home, she is also concerned about
the way that marriage impinges on a woman’s personal autonomy. In part this is
through observation of Meg’s (and Marmee’s) behavior; in part this recognizes
the social realities of the nineteenth century, in part it recognizes the
expectations of Americans in 1949. Once Meg has decided to marry John
Brooke, she determines to create a perfect home for him. Her sole ambition is to
make theirs an ideal marriage, and she has no aspirations beyond her own
home. She has decided to do what Marmee has done, only better (although she
never suggests this directly). Marmee has consistently demonstrated that, for all
her awareness of her own intellect and her own abilities, she acquiesces to
Father and looks to him for guidance. These are admirable nineteenth-century
qualities in a woman, and they were back in vogue, and thus quite acceptable, in
1949. Jo’s quest for personal autonomy does not ﬁt this mode of relationship; she
would like to marry someone - perhaps — but not if marriage impinges on her as
a person.

Certainly this ambivalence mirrored the ambivalence many American
women experienced at the end of WW II. Women who had been fully self-reliant
and had been earning good wages filling “men’s” jobs were reluctant to surrender
their autonomy to the men returning home. Some women were glad to have

husbands and ﬁancés back so that they could stay home and have families, but

82

some would have been just as happy to keep their jobs, with or without families
added to the equation.

Empathy for Jo’s situation could derive as readily from identiﬁcation with
her desire to retain her autonomy as it could from identifying with her concern for
propriety and the probability — laid out so graphically by Laurie — that she would
inevitably marry. Alex Neill’s discussion of empathy in ﬁlm audiences relies on
just such identiﬁcation. Neill notes that “the imaginative activity characteristic of
empathy both presupposes and is constrained by belief. Not only does
empathizing with actual persons involve imagination as well as belief, but
empathizing with ﬁctional characters involves belief as well as imagination” (191).
This reciprocal activity draws the audience into the ﬁctional World of the screen,
allowing viewers to project their own feelings and ideas onto the screen 1
characters and thus to “believe” in the reality of the dilemma facing Jo. One result
of this empathic reciprocity is that the values inherent in the original story are
reinforced within a new social reality. So even though the film was produced in
1949, it promotes the values of 1868. In part this reinforcement inheres in the
story itself; in part it results from production decisions about what to put in, what
to leave out, and whom to cast in the various roles in the ﬁlm. Regardless of the
basis for the ideology expressed, the net message is that women will only ﬁnd
true happiness when they ﬁnd true (male) love and establish their own happy
homes.

Before Jo can settle her dilemma, she must make a hero’s journey of self-

discovery, but she must do so within the bounds of nineteenth-century propriety.

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Jo’s trip to New York is a “safe adventure,” something any young woman might
wish to do and something any mother and father might be willing to allow a
daughter to do, particularly since this daughter was going to be working as a
governess for Mrs. Kirke - a safe job in a protected environment. Jo does have
to make contact with some relatively crude individuals in order to sell her stories
to the illustrated newspapers, but the rest of her experience in New York is
bounded by the gentility of Mrs. Kirke’s boarding house and the equally genteel
boarders who live there. Jo’s trip involves none of the realism of a Stephen
Crane whose Maggie lived in the slums of the city. Instead, Jo spends her time
exclusively with people of her own class. Rather than new situations to enliven
her imagination, she encounters only slight variations on what she is used to in
Concord: conventional people who occasionally do unconventional things. Her
writing remains the same florid, sensational stuff she wrote before.

One event, the trip to the opera, was invented for the earlier movie and
was retained in this and later versions. In the novel, Jo never goes to the opera
while she is in New York. Instead, she and Professor Bhaer are invited by Miss
Norton, one of Mrs. Kirke’s boarders, to attend salon evenings where she meets
some of the intellectual society of New York. The screenwriters replace this
insight into Jo’s intellectual development with the romantic interlude where Jo’s
heart is won by beautiful music. This singular incident, especially Jo’s reaction to
it, along with its references to other artistically focused outings with Professor
Bhaer, is presented as insight into Jo’s deeper, more thoughtful self, something

that shows her artistic sensitivity. Nevertheless, these artistic outings fail to ﬁnd

84

their way into her writing. While the ﬁlm shows a modern young woman behaving
as an independent adult, the subtext, as far as her relationship with the Professor
is concerned, is that it takes a man to guide a woman’s development,
intellectually, artistically, emotionally. Jo’s decision to cease writing sensational
literature is part of this subtext. In keeping with the earlier screenplay, as well as
with the post-war social emphasis on men’s responsibility to look out for women
who might not be able to look out for themselves, Jo gives up writing because the
Professor tells her what she writes is bad for people, not because she decides on
her own that she should use her talent for better things than sensationalism.

This is a signiﬁcant change from the novel. In the original, the Professor
does tell Jo his opinion of sensational literature, but he never directs his criticism
speciﬁcally to her. Instead, he discusses the bad inﬂuence such writing has,
especially for the less educated who have no way to know better than to indulge
their baser natures reading such things. Jo takes his words to heart and
struggles with her conscience on her own, weighing the bad she might be doing
against the money she has been earning. Ultimately, she allows herself to keep
the money for all the work she did writing the stories. However, she burns all of
her manuscripts, and resolves to give up writing unless what she writes will be
edifying to her readers. While the net result is the same in both the ﬁlm and the
movie, the message is decidedly different. In the novel, her more spiritual,
womanly nature, her natural goodness, guide Jo to do the right thing. In the ﬁlm,
the wise man not only points out the error of her ways, but he also is given the

voice of conscience that really decides Jo to give up bad writing. Rather than

85

showing the triumph of a woman over her own faults, the ﬁlm shows a woman
who needs a man to show her how to behave like a woman.

These two conﬂicting notions are endemic to nineteenth-century
sentimental literature, and they are usually reconciled by afﬁrming the notion that
women are more emotional and men are more intellectual. Thus women’s
emotions need men’s intellectual direction just as men’s intellectuality needs the
“softening” of women’s tender emotions. This is precisely the message that the
ﬁlm promotes, and despite its nineteenth-century provenance, it made a
comfortable ﬁt with post-war desires for a return to a golden age of family, one
where mother is the heart and father the head.

In the ﬁlm, Jo’s return home to nurse Beth could be interpreted as
additional sentimentalism, and was probably experienced that way by modern
audiences. Certainly, the mood of the early post-war years would have
encouraged this home-focused selﬂessness and the attendant emotional
involvement it entailed. As Hartmann notes:

Soap operas validated both the practical and psychological
contributions of housewives; they also conveyed the message that
the traditional female activities of helping others and attending to
relationships were more important than the masculine standards
that stressed success in the public world. While the daytime
dramas confined women to conventional roles, they gave those
roles some power, virtue and significance. (198)

Many films functioned the same way, and Little Women was no exception.

86

Jo’s action, both in the novel and in the ﬁlm, was as pragmatic as it was
domestic. Modern viewers would expect a seriously ill person to be nursed in a
hospital by professionals, but nineteenth-century nursing care was usually
administered at home and was usually the duty of the women of the household.
Thus Marmee and Jo were the designated caregivers; in the film as in the novel
that care was rendered at home. The realities of housekeeping in the nineteenth
century demanded as much work as two full-time domestic laborers could
provide, particularly when nursing care was involved, but none of this was even
hinted at—either in the novel or in the ﬁlm. With none of the distractions of real
life cooking and cleaning and laundering, the entire focus of the action could
center on the emotional elements of the interpersonal relationships.

The expert doctor comes only to make pronouncements about Beth’s
condition, and Father and Mr. Laurence have no role in the nursing care Beth
needs. The expert directs what the women do, the other men pace and wait, and
the women do the work — a neatly ordered, patriarchal arrangement that obviates
the notion of gender parity, even if that parity were understood in nineteenth-
century terms of separate spheres. In the novel, the doctor is summoned to
confirm the women’s suspicion that Beth is seriously ill. In the ﬁlm, he makes
pronouncements about her condition because the women don’t filly know how
serious things are and it takes specialized training to make that determination.
Here, “woman’s sphere” is controlled by the illness and the expert, in much the
same way that modern households were under the sway of experts such as Dr.

Spock with his advice on parenting and the psychologists who wrote marriage

87

advice columns for women‘s magazines. In the 19405 (and into the 19505),
experts were becoming ever more important in American culture, particularly
those experts who dealt with the home and family. It was these experts who
made determinations about how women should behave and what the ultimate
consequences of their actions would be for their children and husbands. This
attitude tightened constraints for women even more than the nineteenth-century
notion of separate spheres. At least during the nineteenth century, women were
considered “expert” in their realm of home. By the late 19405, their expertise was
reduced to what they could glean from articles in women’s magazines and advice
books, many of which were written by male experts or by unmarried women.
Where Little Women gave moviegoers examples of “good” womanhood,
Mildred Pierce (1945) is an example of a movie that “condemned two kinds of
women under attack by experts in real life—the sacriﬁcial mother and the career
woman. . . . [B]y the late 19405, women found signiﬁcantly fewer screen models
for female strength, self-sufﬁciency, and satisfying experiences beyond domestic
and romantic life” (Hartmann 201- 2). Women who had been successful wage-
earners during the war were confronted on all sides with images of women
whose lives were constrained by, if not conﬁned to, the home, the only place
women should hope for success. Little Women in 1949 provided a comfortable
image of the kind of success deemed culturally suitable for women. It
sidestepped issues of female self-sufﬁciency in favor of romance and conﬁned
satisfying experiences for women to those they could realize from or within the

home. In spite of using dialogue almost identical to the 1933 version, the

88

emphasis in this later ﬁlm is on the thoroughly domesticated, romantically
satisﬁed woman, not the one who could, and did, manage her home without male
assistance when she needed to. By 1949 Jo, who epitomizes the independent
woman in the novel as well as in the ﬁlm versions, has become a woman in need
of a love interest who will let her create her own domestic haven.

A turning point for Jo is the lecture she gets from the Professor about
writing sensational stories. Without Father to guide her during her stay in New
York, Professor Bhaer ﬁlls the void, assuring that Jo will not have to manage on
her own. Jo is becoming “domesticated” even thought she is away from home.
The novel Jo writes after Beth dies adds one more layer to her ultimate
domestication. Following the Professor’s admonition that she should write from
the heart about things that she knows, Jo retreats from sensational ﬁction into
domestic realism. In part, her trip to New York was about escaping from the
typical constraints of the home, including getting married and being bounded by
the woman’s sphere of the home. Her sensational ﬁction also served as an
escape. Just as the woman-centered home creates a boundary, cutting women
off from most active work socially and politically, so Jo’s retreat into home-
centered ﬁction creates a boundary. Instead of being able to write about the great
things a Goethe might expound upon, she dwells on the personal sorrow of
losing a sister. The implication, based on the Professor’s admonition, that what
she writes from the heart involves the same sort of deep truth or philosophy
Goethe embodies doesn’t hold. Although she writes from her heart, she limits

herself to what can only be considered a platitudinous discussion of home life

89

and home sorrows in terms of the modernist literary criticism informing notions of
literary value in 1949. The title of the book, MyB_et_h, establishes her work as a
piece of domestic sentimentalism and thus not serious literature.

While Alcott's story about the March family promoted a domestic _a_rLd_
feminist message in 1868, the second part of that message did not translate
successfully to ﬁlm. Sentimental literature incorporated a moral vision that was
generally perceived by women of the nineteenth century as part of a continuum
wherein the home and women’s concerns balanced relatively equally the world
and men’s concerns outside the home. However, by 1949, this ideological split
lacked the political and social puissance of the mid-18005. Anything with the aura
of sentimentalism or sentimentality hovering around it had been effectively
devalued by modernist criticism. As Suzanne Clark notes: “It left women out of
the literary canon, and it made sentimental into a term of invective. The
modernist criticism also posed a problem for feminism which persists to this day,
separating literary style from rhetoric and political practice” (34 emphasis in
original). The sort of novel Jo writes in the ﬁlm (and which she never writes at all
in the novel) is sentimental grief therapy and is valued by the Professor because
it is emotional rather than intellectual.

There is ample evidence that Alcott never intended to suggest that women
limit their productive labor to the “women’s work” of housekeeping and nursing.
According to Ruth MacDonald, after the failure of Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands
experiment (and his subsequent breakdown), Louisa’s mother took on the

responsibility for providing for her family. When she was older, Louisa assisted

9O

with the ﬁnancial support of her family (3). She held many jobs, including that of
domestic servant, but writing ultimately brought her the greatest ﬁnancial
success. Writing allowed her to support her family, which she did for essentially
all of her adult life. Alcott and her persona of Jo both managed, eventually, to
maintain their families from within the home. Strickland claims: “Even her
endorsement of women’s organizations had its justiﬁcation in the protection of
the home more than in the alteration of the community. Alcott thus lent the power
of her pen to the drift of opinion begun by the sentimental revolution, a drift that
can be called the privatization of Utopia” (145). This privatized Utopia ﬁt perfectly
with a cold war containment mentality; what had in the nineteenth century been
part of an understanding of woman’s sphere as a place for the right exercise of
power became, instead, a pretty reﬂection of the neatly bounded private family
home. Alan Nadel identiﬁes 1946 — 1964 as “peak cold war America” where
there “was the general acceptance [. . .] of a relatively small set of narratives by
a relatively large portion of the population. It was a period [. . .] when ‘conformity’
became a positive value in and of itself’ (4). Ultimately, the 1949 version of %

Women tells a tale of conformity to a small set of middle-class narratives

 

concerning courtship, marriage, and family; and those narratives were more
restrictive in many ways than those Alcott had put in her novel. Their
restrictiveness, however was mitigated by their presentation in a sugar-coated
tale of love and marriage.

While there is little to suggest that Alcott would have approved of the

modern two-wage-earner family, it is equally unlikely that she would have

91

approved of ending the story she had written with Jo and the professor holding
hands and gazing adoringly at each other. While there was ample hand-holding
as well as other sorts of “lovering” in the novel, Alcott tied these activities to fairly
unromantic notions of commitment and personal responsibility. The novel itself
ﬁnishes with the Bhaers’ own experiment in extended family — Plumﬁeld - the
boarding school for boys wherein they put into practice the middle-class notion of
improving individuals by exposing them to the influence of a good family. This
conclusion allows for womanly efﬁcacy beyond the home; the ﬁlm version does
not.

Where a ﬁlm focus on the strength of the women in or out of the home
worked in 1933, the realities of life in 1949 demanded a rather different
approach. Women could still be strong, but they needed also to be able to easily
accede to the needs/demands of the men in their lives. These same expectations
were held for women in the larger culture. Even Eleanor Roosevelt, who was
known for her support of women’s issues, would write in 1944: “An ever-growing
number of young women in every walk of life are taking jobs as they ﬁnish school
or college, but the main job of the average woman in car coLuntrv still is to marﬂ
ﬂ] have La home and children” (“Woman’s” emphasis in original). In the late
19405, only the exceptional woman was supposed to have interests beyond her
own home, a notion evident in the ﬁlm.

To reinforce this idea, Jo once more meets her Professor, by accident,
after he has left her newly published novel with Hannah. Standing in the rain,

under an umbrella, he makes his fumbling declaration of love and she responds

92

in the predictable manner. Holding his hand, they walk to the house as the rain
ceases and a rainbow arcs over the happy Alcott homestead where the rest of
the family are assembled. This dénouement leaves the audience with the
promise of a happy future for Jo as a wife and mother, and unless the viewer has
read the novel, he or she would have no reason to suspect that the Bhaers will
have anything but a typical married life, the sort where he goes out to work and
she stays home with the children. As noted above, the actual ﬁnish to the novel is
much different from this.

So, instead of the domestic feminism Alcott wove into her novel, the ﬁlm
provides popular sentimentalism and romance subplots, making this Qttl_e
W a faint shadow of the original. As a contemporary reviewer noted: “Metro
has managed to contain a pretty agreeable assortment of period fun and
sentiment.” Nevertheless, he ﬁnishes the review with the comment: “There is a
perceptible deﬂation in the spirit of “Little Women” toward the close, which even a
Technicoldr rainbow over the home at the end does not dispel” (Crowther 2317-
18). This is the review of a “nice” rather than a compelling story, which is what

the 1949 ﬁlm version is.

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Chapter 4

Beyond Feminism: Little Women in the Postmodern Idiom

The 1994 ﬁlm version of Little Women followed not only the two earlier
Hollywood ﬁlm versions but also several television adaptations - including a
cartoon series and a British made-for-television ﬁlm - an opera version, comic
books, and audio books. With so many adaptations available to them, among the
probable audience for this ﬁlm, even viewers who had never seen a copy of the
book would most likely have a personal idea of what the story was about; and
since it was promoted as a truly new adaptation, viewers would be less likely to
expect a version similar to the earlier versions, even if they had seen any of
them. What they would reasonably expect would be Jo, her sisters, Marmee, and
the rest of the cast to take them back to the 18605 for a bit of escapism. The
audience did get to escape; they also got a heavy dose of twentieth-century
realism mixed with nineteenth-century ideology along the way.

In the forty-ﬁve years following the cold war manifestation of Little Women,
the US had experienced the Korean conﬂict, war in Viet Nam, war protest,
student campus activism, feminist revivals, “white ﬂight” and its concomitant new
suburban development, and Reagonomics, just to name a very few key social
and political forces that affected American culture. Many things called into
question “traditional” values and beliefs, and this questioning made 19905
America a postmodern paradigm. Every value or belief was subjected to scrutiny

under any or all of a set of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-factional lenses, and

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charges of relativism and factionalism were leveled at anyone who either tried to
make connections among the many factions or who focused exclusively on a
particular concern. Perceiving American culture to be in a state of dangerous
flux, some politicians, sociologists, and church leaders, among others, declared
that the US was in a state of moral decay and that the cure for this problem was
a return to “traditional” family values. Much of their rhetoric reiterated the
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas that strong, patriarchal families were
necessary for the maintenance of a strong nation.1 The 1994 version of LiLtLa

Women, while purporting to be a feminist version of the story, ultimately is a fairly

 

standard, though postmodern, love-and-marriage—leading-to-a-happy-family ﬁlm
which ultimately reinforces ideas of the “traditional” (read: appropriate) middle-
class nuclear family, complete with the restrictiveness associated with it.

This version was directed by Gillian Armstrong, noted for her ﬁlms with a
woman-centered theme. The screenplay was written by Robin Swicord who also
co-produced the ﬁlm with Denise DiNovi for Columbia Pictures. As in both earlier
versions, much of the appeal of this ﬁlm is predicated on its star-studded cast.
Winona Ryder plays Jo, and Susan Sarandon is Marmee. Meg is played by Trini
Alvarado, Beth by Claire Danes, and Amy by Kirsten Dunst (young Amy) and
Samantha Mathis (adult Amy). Christian Bale plays Laurie and Gabriel Byrne is
Professor Bhaer. The cast of attractive women who have appeared in other ﬁlms

rife with romance and handsome male leads promises a good, romantic story, an

 

1 Sociologists David Popenoe and Barbara Whitehead, for example, argued that healthy families
demanded a wife/mother be in the home - not working. While Popenoe acknowledges that the
modern ideal of the family is only as old as the mid-nineteenth century, he argued that it is now
the tradition and that altering that arrangement is, de facto, dysfunctional. Whitehead’s position

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expectation bolstered by quotes from reviews that call the ﬁlm a “handcrafted
Valentine” (Newsweek) and “a glorious example of the very best in Family
Entertainment” (Sneak Previews) both of which grace the cover of the video
version.

The romantic focus is established during the opening credits. Against a
black background, intricate arabesques in white or blue actively curl around the
still pictures and names of the stars of the ﬁlm. In typical 19905 fashion, the stars
are named but not the parts they play in the ﬁlm, the implication being that the
viewers are just supposed to know the actors well enough to ﬁgure that out for
themselves. The musical score composed by Thomas Newman for this ﬁlm is
new, although it bears a striking resemblance to Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for
the Common Man”; Copland’s music is distinctly modern, and so is this score.
For viewers familiar with this musical idiom, the music would feel as thoroughly.
American as the Stephen Foster style the two earlier ﬁlms had used. For those
unfamiliar with the idiom, the music would sound “classical” but not too heavy,
making the score very effective as an aural aid to entry into a pre-rock and roll
era of American life. The classical-sounding music is also an indicator of the
romance to come; it is sedate but not so slow as to be boring, suggestive of
hand-holding and hugging, those somewhat outdated, but gentle and respectful,
modes of relating between men and women. The final bit of romanticism before

the ﬁlm actually begins is a brief clip showing someone putting a Christmas

 

corresponds with Popenoe’s; her major concern is keeping women out of the work force so that
they can devote more time to their children.

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wreath on a front door. All these markers establish this as a ﬁlm based on
sentiment, and the opening sequence does not disappoint in this regard.

It is true that the opening sequence retains the sentiment promised in the
opening credits; it also makes the statement that this is to be a realistic ﬁlm. First,
it shows Marmee returning home, kicking real snow off her boots, and being
engulfed by her four daughters. The group retires to Marmee’s chair where the
signature mise-en-scene is established. In this version, however, the girls are not
dressed in their lovely (if restrictive) nineteenth-century garb. Instead, viewers
are treated to the more realistic picture of four young women ready for bed,
complete with rag curlers in Amy’s hair and long-sleeved white night dresses on
all the girls. Father’s letter is produced and read, but with little apparent effect
except to make the girls miss Father. Almost as a non sequitur Amy admits to
being a selﬁsh girl, although she is no more nor less selﬁsh in this version than
any of her sisters. After reading the letter, the family sings Christmas carols and
then they head up to bed, each carrying her own candle - another realistic a_nd
romantic touch. In the 19905, candles do not represent practical lighting but soft
mood lighting, reserved for special occasions, church services, and romantic
moments.

Aside from the romantic nature of the ﬁlm, this sequence establishes
immediately that this is not a remake of the earlier Hollywood version. It is clear
that screenwriter Robin Swicord has taken full advantage of the episodic and
non-linear nature of the novel, changing details and freely re-arranging plot

elements. For example, the novel, as well as the two earlier ﬁlm versions, shows

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the girls dressed, rehearsing Jo’s play, and making tea for Marmee when she
comes home. In other words, they are shown at home actively doing things and
in a ﬁt state for greeting callers, should there be any. Having the girls ready for
bed emphasizes their vulnerability and, therefore, their youth; and in the late
twentieth century, youth and romance are virtually synonymous. Another altered
detail is the singing around the piano. In all three earlier versions, the song is a
hymn and the net image is of the sacred hearth served by the angels of the
house. In the 1994 ﬁlm, they sing a sprightly religious Christmas carol not likely
to evoke thoughts of religion so much as of angels and Santa Claus. The only
other possible allusion to the sacred home, if it is fair to read it that way, is the
candles the girls carry; this is, at best, an ambiguous symbol. Nevertheless, the
ﬁnal impression the opening sequence gives is of the private family home as the
center of all things good, a safe haven that is proof against the ills rampant
outside the home. Similar notions had long been reiﬁed in urban and, especially,
suburban homes whose design offered room for entertaining guests but created,
a la Frank Lloyd Wright, a private family area isolated from the outside (Wright
33+). (Actually, the Victorian parlor functioned the same way, keeping visitors out
of the kitchen and the private family areas of the house. However, poorer
households did not have the luxury of a parlor, often consisting of only one or two
rooms where all household activities occurred. Then as now, class standing
determined a family’s ability to achieve the ideal of a truly private home.) By the
19805 and 905 this extreme privacy had translated into the development of

planned communities with restrictive covenants and, more pointedly, into the

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development of planned and gated communities. The comforting image of the
March home evokes memories of a mythical golden past where neighbors need
not lock their doors against each other, and viewers want to believe in that myth.
Planned and gated communities offer the promise of a modern version of that
myth; the ﬁlm image connects it to its largely nineteenth-century roots.

Most of the incidents included in this ﬁlm also appear in the earlier
versions, but, as noted above, they are considerably re-arranged. The ﬁrst
Christmas simply shows the family headed for bed singing a religious Christmas
carol. In this version the girls do agree to give their Christmas breakfast to the
Hummels, but we only see them leaving their home, not at the Hummels. There
is no Christmas play in this version. The fancy dress ball in this version is held at
the Gardiner’s, not the Laurence’s. A key addition to this ﬁlm is the incident
involving Amy’s burning of Jo’s manuscript and Amy’s subsequent near drowning
in Walden Pond during a skating outing. Marmee is called to Washington, D. C.,
to nurse Mr. March and is again accompanied by Mr. Brooke. Beth’s ﬁrst illness
and eventual recovery is conﬂated in this version with Mr. Laurence’s gift of the
piano to her and Father’s retum from the war - at Christmas. Meg later marries
Mr. Brooke, Jo turns down Laurie’s proposal of marriage, Amy gets the trip to
Europe that Jo wanted, and Jo goes to New York. Swicord’s script includes many
more scenes in Europe than either earlier ﬁlm, giving viewers a chance to watch
the budding romance between Amy and Laurie. Another episode not in either

earlier ﬁlm is Aunt March’s bequest of her home, Plumfield, to Jo. This ﬁlm

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finishes as the others with Beth’s death, Jo’s novel, and Professor Bhaer’s
proposal under an umbrella in the rain in the middle of the road.

In a review by James Berardinelli, director Gillian Armstrong is quoted as
saying, “But [Little Women is] actually a wonderful epic tale about family where
men's roles are just as important and deeply involved in the story." However,
except for Laurie, who has fewer scenes than any earlier Laurie, and Professor
Bhaer, who ‘Iectures’ Jo intermittently, the other men, including Father and the
doctor who attends Beth, share perhaps ten lines among them. The story is
clearly about family, whether it actually qualiﬁes as an epic or not, but it is about
family as a female enterprise. Men are important in this version in the same way
that they were in the novel — as the overseers who guide emotional women and
thus keep the family stable, and as love interests for the younger women who
have yet to begin their own families. The difference between the novel and the
ﬁlm is that men are even less visible on screen than in the novel. This would
certainly tend to support a feminist reading of the ﬁlm, except that the women are
not depicted as powerful social actors except when they are exercising their
feminine inﬂuence on men.

Other reviews contribute to romantic perceptions of the ﬁlm. For example,
Roger Ebert notes that “"Little Women" may be marketed for children and
teenagers, but my hunch is it will be best appreciated by their parents. It‘s a ﬁlm
about how all of life seems to stretch ahead of us when we’re young, and how,
through a series of choices, we narrow our destiny.” This reading adds a

dimension to the ﬁlm that can best be perceived by a parent rather than a child or

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teenager. It is also a reading that raises questions about whose destiny is
narrowed, since the focus is on the sisters and their choices (except for Laurie’s
European sojourn while he pulls himself together after Jo’s refusal of his
marriage proposal). If the ﬁlm is about choices narrowing one’s destiny, for
women that destiny is quite obviously to become wives and mothers, after ﬁnding
suitors who set the heart aﬂutter. Interestingly, Ebert’s idea that adults will
appreciate the ﬁlm more than children echoes reviews of the original novel.
Reviewers of the novel saw Little Women as an exemplary text that parents
might use as a guide for their own family concerns, whereas Ebert’s analysis
appears to be a response to the nostalgia engendered by a ﬁlm that looks back
to a golden past. Part of that golden past includes the romantic notion of the
happy family comfortably ensconced in a well-run home.

The gift of their Christmas breakfast to the Hummels demonstrates the
“too goodness” of the sisters. In this ﬁlm, the girls hear that Marmee had left early
to attend to Mrs. Hummel whose baby was coming. Hannah’s description of the
sorry state the Hummels are in gives the girls pause and before they eat a bite
they agree — without any discussion or disagreement — to take their breakfast to
that poor family. They head out, on foot, singing a secular Christmas carol, “Here
We Come A’Wassailing,” while Mr. Laurence and Laurie are shown in their
carriage on their way to church. What is interesting about this scene is that it
excises any direct association between Christmas and religious faith, something
that was very important in Alcott’s novel as the foundation upon which the girls

must build their own good characters. The too-easy decision to give away their

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breakfast reﬂects “[t]he tendency to shy away from the more difﬁcult moral
questions that nineteenth-century novelists like Alcott regularly raised”
(Marchalonis 266). Without the struggle between selﬂessness and self-interest,
all that is left is the sentimental picture of nice girls doing a nice thing. This
creates a sense of natural goodness in the girls, an idea that is quite out of
keeping with the nineteenth-century Protestant understanding of sin and human
failings. The audience gets the sentimental depiction of self-sacriﬁce without any
explanation of the basis for their (now sentimentalized) behavior.

Marchalonis also notes that “this tendency by contemporary ﬁlmmakers,
as well as literary critics, to reject or refuse to see the moral and religious belief
that informs Alcott’s world and to impose current values and concepts on her
texts goes to the heart of any real discussion of adaptation” (268). Leaving
religion out of the picture, literally and ﬁguratively, makes it much easier to
modernize the story as well as to promote an agenda, whether political, social,
feminist, or simply romantic. Each adaptation of Little Women moves not only
further away in time, but also in philosophy, from the original. Yet each
adaptation inevitably incorporates the sentimental ideas that inhere in the
episodes used to retell the story. This is more true, in many ways, for
Armstrong’s and Swicord’s feminist reading of the novel than for either of the
earlier ﬁlm versions, most likely because some modern feminist ideas are so
similar to nineteenth-century sentimental ones, especially the importance of
strong woman-to-woman bonds and the sense that women “know” things in a

different way from the way men do. This may explain why screenwriter and

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director incorporated no discussion about whether to take breakfast to the
Hummels. The girls just “knew" what the right thing was, and they did it.
“Knowing” of this sort is one of the most consistently applied nineteenth-century
conventions in the ﬁlm.

Two scenes in this version bear a striking resemblance to parts of the
1953 ﬁlm How to Magy a Millionaire: getting Meg and Jo primped for the party at
the Gardiners and packing Meg’s bags for her stay with Annie Moffat for Annie’s
coming out party. Both are exemplary representations of female solidarity. In the
first, when Jo inadvertently burns off a lock of Meg’s hair with the curling iron,
Amy offers her hair ribbon. The girls have also raided the rag bag to ﬁnd a pair of
dancing pumps for Meg to wear. In the second, each of the girls and Marmee
offer some supplement to Meg’s meager wardrobe, including sashes, ribbons,
hankies, and gloves. Both recall the machinations of Marilyn Monroe, Lauren
Bacall, and Betty Grable sharing a Manhattan apartment as well as one fur coat
and one fashionable wardrobe among them with which they hope to snag
wealthy men for themselves. As in the 1953 ﬁlm, the sisters’ efforts are directed
toward making Meg attractive to the young men who will be at the parties. The
message is clear: women need to attract men and to do that they need to be
suitably adorned. This was not a part of Alcott’s agenda, but it resonates with late
twentieth-century sensibilities: relationships are founded on attraction, and
women should do the attracting. In spite of Marmee’s mini-lecture after the ﬁrst
party where she says “I will not have my girls being silly about boys,” Meg and

Amy continue to devote much of their energy to appearance and to assessing its

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effect on the young men they meet. If marriage was the middle-class woman’s
ultimate goal in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth it is essentially the same.
The only difference is that in its modern manifestation, attracting a man does not
need to involve marriage, even though viewers know that it will in this ﬁlm.
Audiences also know that Beth will die before she can develop any such
relationship and that Jo will eventually marry her Professor. Finally, they know
that the marriages will be fairly conventional; this version does not offer even a
suggestion that married life for the little women will differ much from Marmee’s.2
Their husbands will provide for them and they will manage their homes and any
children they might have.

The episode involving Amy and her school demonstrates a dearly held
American belief in action, the belief that children belong (rather in a proprietary
sense) to/with their parents. Marmee, who disagrees with corporal punishment as
a means of discipline, removes Amy from school and determines to have her
study at home. This can work in the ﬁlm because it is a manifestation of
nineteenth-century social reality; but in the twentieth century, the state controls
schooling more than parents do. While it is true that parents with the ﬁnancial
means can purchase private schooling and those with the academic and ﬁnancial
means can elect home schooling, the majority of parents send their children to
public schools because they must. Their children have a right to education, and
the state obliges them to get that education, regardless of what their parents

believe. This is a logical outgrowth of the ideology of the individual; every

 

2 Audiences for this ﬁlm will also have seen many years of television situation comedies ranging
from “Father Knows Best” to “All in the Family” as models for the sort of conventionality the little

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individual, even one with parents, has rights that transcend even the bonds and
bounds of family. Anthropologist Herve Varenne argues convincingly that the
American ideology of family, based as it is on the ideology of independence,
militates in favor of such a notion. Children are taught, almost from birth, to be
individuals and to recognize their parents as individuals, and this separation is
maintained in law in that “[n]o aspect of a family transcending the unit made by
the marrying couple is recognized in legal documents” (421-23). The sentimental
ideology of family claims its own transcendence, that of emotional bonds over
legal ones - and this despite the fact that more and more aspects of family
relations are determined by law rather than by attachment. Nonetheless, the ﬁlm
here afﬁrms the primacy of feeling over any other characteristic of family
organization, and it is feeling that assures that children Mg to their parents,
especially their mothers, a distinctly a nineteenth-century notion that informs
modern ideals for families.

An incident from the novel included in this ﬁlm version but absent from the
two earlier ﬁlms is Amy’s burning of Jo’s manuscript. The vignette includes Meg
and Jo going off to the theater with Laurie and refusing to be sympathetic to
Amy’s desire to go with the older girls on this special outing. Jo is particularly
abrupt, almost mean, as she consigns Amy to the position of child, too young to
go out for the evening. Amy vows revenge, and she exacts it by burning the
manuscript Jo has been working on for several months. The next day, when Jo
and Laurie go for a last skating outing before the ice is too thin on Walden Pond,

Amy follows. Jo fails to warn Amy about a patch of thin ice, Amy falls through,

 

women can expect.

105

and Laurie and Jo have to rescue her. Subsequently, Jo is remorseful because
she did not heed Marmee’s admonition the night before: “Don’t let the sun go
down on your anger,” and her obstinacy nearly cost Amy her life.

In the novel, incidents like this one are intended as object lessons for the
readers. They function to delineate the parameters of appropriate behavior
and/or appropriate feeling. In this case, anger is a bad feeling which needs to be
controlled, and that control should come from the strength of good feelings -
love, especially. In sentimental literature nothing is as powerful as love; properly
understood and properly applied, love amends all problems. However, love of
this sort demands an interiority, a personal stillness, so that the individual can be
receptive to love’s inﬂuence. Jo’s character in both novel and ﬁlm lack this
quality; part of the maturation process for Jo is that she acquire this interior quiet
so that she can become a thoughtful adult rather than a flighty adolescent.
However, in the ﬁlm there is no perceptible change in Jo’s character after this
traumatic event. Instead, there is a reconciliation that barely escapes
mawkishness before the sisters go on with business as usual. Rather than a step
in Jo’s growth as a woman, this episode serves as a vehicle for display of as
many intense emotions as possible, once again focusing the audience on the
sentiment rather than the story or any message the story might contain. Indeed,
in this ﬁlm version, none of the sister’s appears to change during the course of
the ﬁlm, no matter what the provocation, except that they get older. The
personalities they display in the opening scenes don’t grow; instead different

aspects of their already formed characters are revealed throughout the ﬁlm.

106

Consider Beth. Throughout the film, Beth plays the part of the wallﬂower,
nicknamed “Cricket,” the sister who is “shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed
[. . .] that no one sees [. . .] till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and
the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind”
(Alcott 42). In the course of the ﬁlm, Beth manages to hide, or be hidden, even
when she is the center of attention, as when Mr. Laurence gives her the piano for
Christmas. Almost overcome by emotion, she does ﬁnd the strength to play for
the assembled friends and family while the scene shifts from her to them. In the
novel and both earlier ﬁlms, Beth, the painfully shy, does the extraordinary thing
of going by herself to Mr. Laurence’s home to thank him for his kindness.
Overcoming shyness hardly ranks as major character development;
nevertheless, her behavior does indicate a willingness to act on her own,
something adults must learn to do. What this ﬁlm does, instead, is create a near-
perfect “Hallmark moment,” complete with decorated tree, lots of lighted candles,
and people in holiday garb singing carols. Beth remains the child, perhaps
foreshadowing what has already been suggested by her illness and long
recovery - that Beth will die before she has the chance to grow up.

The shift in emphasis from one who acts to one who is acted upon plays
on only one aspect of the sentimental, that of feeling, in this case feeling for a
child who will never have the chance to grow up. It also plays on the twentieth-
century hyper-concem for children and their well-being, an outgrowth of what
Bernard Wishy characterizes as the idea “that only the pure and innocent could

save the world” but that “the world might be too much for the pure and innocent”

107

(93). In the modern era that translates into protecting children from the world,
much as Beth was protected by the boundaries of the March home. It is contact
with the outside world that ultimately caused her death, after all.

When Marmee is called to Washington to nurse Mr. March, who has been
wounded in action, she leaves the girls instructions to help Hannah and to mind
her and to take care of the Hummels. Each of the girls is so intent on her own
pursuits outside the home that Beth is forced, by the weight of her conscience, to
go out to care for the Hummels. The Hummel children have developed scarlet
fever and Beth contracts the disease after the infant dies in her arms. In the
single sequence in the ﬁlm where Beth acts on the world, the world, indeed,
proves to be too much for her. She is permanently weakened by the disease, and
later in the ﬁlm dies because of another illness she contracts in her weakened
condition. One of the tenets of sentimental literature is that self-sacriﬁce is a key
component of female power, but it is a conﬂicted tenet in that self-sacriﬁce often
leads to self-loss. So, while Beth has exercised her power as a woman, albeit a
little one, she has also given up her own future, in much the same way that a
woman gave up any sort of legal or social autonomy in nineteenth-century
marriage. Although Beth never gets to marry anyone, she does get to give up
any potential for autonomy. Women, in this ﬁlm, are never fully realized
individuals until they, paradoxically, give themselves over to others, whether to
the men they will marry or to persons outside of the safe precincts of their
childhood home. In sentimental literature, the trope of the redemptive child is a

powerful statement of one of the tenets of domesticity, that self-sacriﬁce is a key

108

component of domestic power. Descriptions of women who fit the model for the
goodness domesticity dictates are virtually indistinguishable from the descriptions
of good children. Beth gets to be both in the ﬁlm.

Of interest in this ﬁlm version is the way the role of the expert is modiﬁed
during Beth’s ﬁrst illness, which happens while Marmee is in Washington. The
sisters hesitate to send for her because they know that she will have to leave
Father to the care of whoever happens to be available, yet they feel helpless to
do anything about Beth’s condition. By the time they are ready to send for her,
Marmee is already on the way because Laurie has sent for her. When she comes
into Beth’s sick room, she begins immediately to issue commands about what to
bring in and what she intends to do — “draw the fever from her head.” The doctor
has done nothing that seems to have helped, but after Marmee’s ministrations,
Beth is revived and gets well, at least, well enough to come downstairs for the
Christmas scene described above. There is a double message in this sequence,
the net effect of which is to conﬁrm that women have a place and that place is a
home where there is a strong man. When the sisters are indecisive, it takes a
man, Laurie, to make the decision that the girls cannot, thus restoring the mother
to the home. When she comes home, where she is in her realm, she takes
charge of the situation, accomplishing what even the doctor cannot. However,
Marmee’s decisiveness, while it indicates a strong, intelligent woman, does not
indicate an especially liberated one. She functions within the conﬁnes of her own

home, performing duties that were considered women’s work. All the women,

109

young and old, are bound by their natures (emotional) and by their sphere (the
private family home).

Perhaps the most notable “adjustment” is in Jo’s character; she is no
longer a tomboy, just an irrepressible young woman. In this ﬁlm, Jo does, indeed,
scorch her dresses in front of the ﬁre, and she does use slang. However, she
never seems to be importuned by being a girl, just a little aggravated by full skirts
from time to time although she does tend to make threats of violence against
anyone who causes problems for her sisters. Thus, when Meg goes to Sallie
Moffat’s coming out party and returns with town gossip about Mrs. March trying
to set up her daughters with wealthy suitors, Jo has the opportunity for a rant.
Where in the novel this incident, presented in the chapter entitled “Meg Goes to
Vanity Fair,” serves as the vehicle for Meg to learn for herself the dangers of
feminine vanity, in the ﬁlm this lesson comes from Marmee’s didactic speech
about beauty fading and how important it is for women to be educated and
accomplished. Meg and Jo receive this speech as a reminder of what they
already know. Their acquiescence subverts the opportunity for character
development in this screenplay. Instead of learning a lesson, Meg and Jo just
seem to “know,” in that peculiarly feminine manner, that Marmee is right and they
have to accept their place in the grand scheme of things - married or not.

Marriage is Meg’s life goal, and she and Mr. Brooke do marry. This is one
place where Father might have had a more prominent role as the minister who
performs the wedding ceremony. However, the audience never sees the

ceremony; Father becomes here only one of the guests at the wedding who

110

dance in a circle around newlyweds standing in the arbor and sing “For the
Beauty of the Earth” (the closest thing to a religious moment in the ﬁlm). Yet the
purpose of the scene is not so much to exemplify the solemnity of the occasion
as it is to give the lovely bride a lovely wedding. The hymn’s imagery stresses the
beauties of the physical world and the love with which that world is imbued,
neither of which is clearly related to the responsibilities implicit in taking marriage
vows. The responsibilities of marriage are subsumed by the romantic elements of
the celebration: a bride, a groom, and lots of ﬂowers and friends. The scene is
not suggestive of the lasting nature of the marriage vow; rather, it suggests that
the community - all those people on the outside looking in at the couple - will be
watching to see whether they will be successful. Marriage is a compact between
two individuals, but it has long been one which the community presumes to
oversee, whether in the name of morality or order. In the ﬁlm, it is clear that the
couple may be able to establish a private home, but it is not clear that they will be
able to protect that privacy from the outside world, a very postmodern concern
dressed in nineteenth-century ideology. The world (family and friends) are
outside; the newlyweds are “alone” inside.

After the wedding, when Amy is selected as Aunt March’s traveling
companion for the trip to Europe, Jo feels her childhood family slipping away
from her. She becomes restless, although she is not sure why, and determines
that she needs a change; Marmee arranges for her trip to New York. It is in this
section of the ﬁlm that the screenplay is most like, as well as most unlike, the

novel. In the earlier ﬁlms, the action in New York was played In fairly typical

111

fashion; characters came and went, having scenes with each other as the story
line demanded, and there are plenty of such scenes in this ﬁlm. There are also,
however, several sequences where the audience gets to see the action on the
screen with voiceovers spoken by Jo. This device both shows and tells the
audience about Jo’s experiences in New York. In the novel, the entirety of Jo’s
trip is related through the letters she writes home, keeping the focus more on
home than on what Jo is doing on her own; and with the voiceovers, some of that
sense comes across In the ﬁlm. What also comes across, though, thanks to the
screen action, is a good sense of Jo’s individual endeavors. Her individual
activity is further spotlighted by the dialogue and action that goes on in New
York. Part of this individual activity is earning money by selling her sensational
fiction; part of it is her “ﬂirtation” with Professor Bhaer.

In New York, Jo allows herself the freedom to write the kinds of stories
that she used to put into the family theatricals she and her sisters produced.
Since her adolescent stories ﬁt the sensational mode popular at the time, she
had no difficulty selling her work and amassing funds to send home for payment
of various bills and purchase of necessities (and even some luxuries) for her
family. Oddly, this pursuit of her sensationalist literary career meshes almost
seamlessly with her “ﬂirtation” with Professor Bhaer. His critique of her work
demands that she “sweep mud in the streets” rather than prostituting her talent —
a decidedly modernist critique and one that classes her abilities with those of
“great” writers such as Goethe, whom Jo admires. She also respects the

Professor and, since they are not engaged in an intimate personal relationship —

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they are merely friends - she is free to seek his counsel, which she does on a
regular basis. He is seen at least once during the voiceovers leaning over Jo as
she writes at her small desk, presumably offering editorial comments.

As in the earlier ﬁlm versions, Jo attends the opera with Professor Bhaer,
but this time they do not sit in public seats. Instead, they are seated on a catwalk
in the wings. Not only is Jo unchaperoned, but she is also in a distinctly
bohemian space, not just in a theater but in a section of the theater usually
reserved for the persons who work in theaters. It is true that Alcott “trod the
boards” herself; it is equally true that “theater people” were not the stuff of which
sound families were constructed in the nineteenth century. Most modern
audiences either would not be conscious of this bias or would not recognize its
social puissance as nineteenth-century ideology. Instead, they would tend to
think of the backstage experience as part of the romance of the theater, part of
the exoticism of being in a space outside the constraints of everyday life. This
may explain the liberties the screenwriter takes here with the story.

First, Swicord has an unchaperoned young woman in a public space with
an unmarried man. Second, the two are sitting closer together than they would
be in typical theater seats. Third, the Professor translates the opera fairly literally
for Jo, including the passion the lovers on stage declare between them. The
technique is fairly standard: the action on the (ﬁlmed) stage mimics or presages
the action on the film screen. Given the relatively liberal politics the Alcotts
professed, it is not inconceivable that Louisa herself might have been in some

similar situation at some stage in her life. Nonetheless, under no circumstances

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would Alcott have been induced to write a scene where Jo and the Professor kiss
in this sort of public setting and long before any sort of commitment is made
between them. For one thing, even sensational literature had no convention short
of rape to accommodate such activity. For another, Little Women, in its children’s
literature guise, would never have breached convention that way. It would have
been the height of indelicacy for Jo to hear about romantic/sexual passion in the
manner depicted in the ﬁlm. Also, no self-respecting, middle-class lady would
have allowed Professor Bhaer the liberty of intimate physical contact, any more
than anyone as reﬁned as the Professor would have suggested such a thing.
What appears to be a charmingly innocent interchange at one and the same time
misrepresents the nineteenth-century ideology intrinsic in the story while it makes
the story seem romantically old-fashioned to a modern audience. Things aren’t
necessarily done that way nowadays, but they seem charmingly antique, as do
the values that inform them, when portrayed in a modern ﬁlm. In part, it is that
charm that constitutes the appeal of the scene itself; it is also that charm that
makes nineteenth-century ideology so appealing, thus mitigated by the
irrepressible Jo and her handsome (in this version) Professor behaving in a
decidedly late twentieth-century manner.

In her discussion of UncleTom’s Ca_bi_n and institutionalized racism, Gillian
Brown notes “that sentimentalism works both to alter and to emphasize dividing
lines” (60). In the present instance, the dividing lines include an acceptable/
unacceptable split and an old-fashionedlmodern split; the issue here is morality

rather than race. In the sentimental tradition, legitimate emotion puriﬁes both the

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emoter and the object of the emotion, creating the possibility for the open
expression of affection. For example, when Friedrich proposes to Jo in the novel,
she responds by kissing him on the public road. The behavior is not exactly
“proper,” yet it is not “wrong” either, since these two adult individuals have
agreed to a future together. The behavior is excusable, even within the
sentimental framework. If the dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable
behavior can be altered in the novel, there is no reason that a modern adaptation
should not extend that alteration to a chaste kiss following the realization of true
affection. That there are no overt sexual overtones makes the moment seem old-
fashioned despite its historical inaccuracy; the scene manifests the sentimental
ideology promoting sexual purity while satisfying the modern audience’s
expectation that two people in love will, and should, kiss.

Jo’s return to Concord to help care for Beth interrupts this budding
romance although Jo thinks often of the professor. Jo does write to him, but they
do not correspond regularly — for reasons that are not really clear, and Jo next
sees the Professor when he stops in Concord on his way West, after he has had
her book published. It is surprising that in this ﬁlm it is still the Professor who has
Jo’s book published rather than Jo doing it herself. She sends the book to him,
seeking his approval for what she has written from the soul, to prove she can
produce the kind of writing he had earlier instructed her to do. In this ﬁlm, as in
the novel and the earlier ﬁlms, heterosexual romance takes precedence over

feminist sensibilities. The most important thing Jo can do (despite Marmee’s

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admonitions to her daughters to make the most of their lives and intellects) is to
successfully “land” her man.

In the novel, Jo doesn’t write a book after Beth’s demise. She takes up
writing again at Marmee’s suggestion because Marmee thinks that it will do Jo
good to write again. Writing from the heart, Jo sells several pieces to magazines
and newspapers. Professor Bhaer determines to see Jo again because he sees
one of her pieces, a piece he considers “good” because it is written from the
heart, in a newspaper. The fact that he approves of her work makes Jo happy,
but she has not been writing for him but for herself. It would have been fairly easy
for Swicord to write this scenario into her script, yet this film adaptation does
exactly what the earlier ﬁlms have done: it makes Jo’s writing for publication
contingent on Friedrich’s approval. At the moment when this ostensibly feminist
version of the story might have most clearly explicated some of the feminist
leanings of the novel, Jo is once more consigned to writing to “please” a man.
This romantic move obviates virtually all the feminist subtext of this ﬁlm,
concomitantly setting up the final scene where the two “plight their troth.”

The Professor leaves the galley proofs of Jo’s novel with Hannah, and Jo
discovers them just in time to chase him down the road. She thanks the
Professor for getting her book published, makes clear to him that she is not
married to Laurie, and assures the Professor that she cares for him by uttering
the line the audience has been waiting for. In response to his statement that he
has nothing to offer but his empty hands, she puts her hands in his and says “Not

empty now.” With those three words, Jo aligns herself with her two married

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sisters and Marmee as one more nineteenth-century female who understands
that her ideal place in the world is as a wife and mother. She is a woman in love,
glad to be loved by the man she loves.

The ﬁnal sequence amalgamates a number of images in a last effusion of
sentimentality. First, Jo is pictured in the kitchen, up to her elbows in ﬂour as she
kneads bread, a supremely domestic chore outdone only by Meg’s bathing of the
twins in the kitchen at the same time. Jo has finally become sufficiently
domesticated to perform purely domestic tasks, whether bread baking or playing
the aunt. This scene allows the audience to see how much Jo longs for the kind
of security her sister has in her marriage and family. She has no thought for her
book, the one she sent to Professor Bhaer for his approval, and so is overcome
with emotion a short time later when she opens a package from him containing
the galley proofs of her book ad when she learns that he has left without
speaking to her. Visually, at least, this sequence lays out one of the most
fervently promoted tenets of the novel: that nothing in life - even publishing a
novel - can be “satisfactory substitutes for wife [or husband] and child, and
home“ (Alcott 347).

The Professor, believing that he has lost his chance for domestic
happiness with Jo, is leaving for a job where he will live the solitary life of a
bachelor. Jo, unwilling to give up her last chance for happiness or to live the
solitary life of a spinster, follows him. Once she catches up with him, their
fumbling conversation sounds quaintly antiquated as each attempts to glean the

truth from the other without asking indelicate questions. The sequence is

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unapologetically romantic and equally non-feminist. It doesn’t matter here (as it
did in the novel) whether Jo and Friedrich will have an egalitarian relationship.
What matters is that they are in love and that Jo can bake bread and care for
children. The opportunity to demonstrate the strengths of domestic feminism is
lost to idealized depictions of domestic activity, and the realistic elements of the
ﬁlm fail to stand for the relatively radical notions Alcott incorporated into her book.
In fact, most of the realistic depictions are either so brief as to leave no notable
impression or are so romanticized as to seem like fun or at least appealing
pastimes.

At the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-ﬁrst, women
continue to struggle for many of the rights and privileges Alcott suggested that
they should have in Little Women. A good many of those rights and privileges are
deﬁned in relation to a woman’s role as wife and mother. Alcott wrote about
woman’s social power as a natural concomitant to her domestic function as moral
guardian of the home, and some twentieth-century feminist theorists “[assert]
women’s greater moral strength in the face of a troubled world and their own
subordination,” a subordination dependent upon the patriarchal organization of
the middle-class family (Ginzburg 218). At the same time, at least one self-
described non-feminist suggests that the gains women have made as a result of
twentieth-century feminist activity have only succeeded in disrupting families and
intensifying competition between men and women and that women can and
should be less selﬁsh in their decisions regarding marriage and family

(Crittendon 188-91 ). One might conclude from these that women, as the morally

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better class of human, ought, as Christopher Lasch suggested, accept the fact
that if sacriﬁces are to be made in life, women ought to be the ones to make
them. If one were to understand this latter view as “feminist,” then Armstrong’s
Little Women might also be considered a feminist statement. However, there is
very little to distinguish this notion of feminism from what right wing proponents of
a return to the “traditional” family values of America in the 19505 advocated — a
mother in every home and a father at the ofﬁce. Notwithstanding Marmee’s
advice to Jo: “Go and embrace your liberty and see what wonderful things come
of it,” the ﬁlm can not reach a satisfying dénouement until one of those wonderful
things turns out to be Jo’s engagement to Friedrich. The ﬁnal fade to the March
home in the background, safely nestled in a stand of mature trees, assure the
audience that Jo will not be long in creating her own family in her own home.

While hardly anyone really believes that it is possible to change the world
from the comfort of one’s own hearth, the home and family continue to be the site
of conﬂict over women’s proper place in society. The concept of separate
spheres — women socializing children and providing emotional support to men
who experience “the alienation of the workplace” and men going out of the home
to provide for the family are “two of the main functions of the family according to
functionalist sociologists” (Whelehan 17). These functions are not substantively
different from the gender-assigned functions of the nineteenth century, and now,
as then, the functions depend on a middle-class lifestyle. According to Whelehan,
“feminism’s chief problem is to ascertain whether one feature -the

representation/positioning of women as subordinate/other - remains the same” in

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the postmodern era as it was in prior eras. Additionally, she posits that “the
cultural logic of sexual difference has gained momentum from its historical
longevity, resulting in the ‘fact’ of difference being entrenched in experience”
(200-1). In large measure, this positioning and difference are endemic to the
conditions of a postmodern ideology of family that is not substantially different
from that ideology as it developed in the nineteenth century.

The ills of society continue to be laid, ﬁguratively, at the hearth, and the
mother continues to be identiﬁed as the key player in keeping that hearth happy
and healthy. Domestic feminism was predicated on the perception that a woman
could exercise power from her own home and thus be an active member of
society at the same time that she fulﬁlled her domestic function; modern
feminism treats the home as only one site along a continuum of social institutions
where power is unequally distributed, whether on the basis of gender or class or
race. Feminism in the postmodern age is multifarious, engaging as it does issues
of race, heterosexuality, power relations, identity politics, and oppression.
Whelehan “would not wish to suggest that a single unifying feminist discourse is
either possible or desirable, but rather that feminisms can thrive upon such a
diversity of approaches (146). If there is a feminism that informs the 1994 ﬁlm of
Little Women, it is one that harks back to the era of the hoop skirt. It is a
depiction of sentimental feminism, a “weak sister” to domestic feminism, because
it has no foundation other than feeling, and feeling, in twentieth-century terms, is
nothing but sentiment. For all practical purposes, with the 1994 ﬁlm version of

Little Women, the sentimental is incarnated in the twentieth century not as a

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moral force but as foil for romance in the kind of ﬁlm that has come to be termed

a “chick ﬂick.”

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Chapter 5

What It All Comes To

“Literature . . . i_s a set of social conditions and its analysis consists in
identifying the effects of these conditions — on the uses and functioning of
writings produced in earlier periods just as much as the uses and functioning of
the forms of writing they support and call forth” (Bennett 284 emphasis in
original). If one accepts Bennett’s characterization, literary products must be
seen as intrinsic elements of history, both the historical past that they inhabited
and that history as we understand it in relation to our own present. The social
conditions surrounding the production of the novel gttle Women included, among
others, the Civil War and its aftermath, the effects of rapid urbanization and
industrialization, the growth of the middle class, and concerns about how best to
Americanize immigrants. In one way or another, each of these issues is
addressed in the novel, and they are addressed from within the framework of that
proper institution, the middle class, nuclear family, American-style. If, as HR.
Brown says of sentimental novels, “the primary function of the novelist was to
teach” (169), Alcott’s book serves admirably as social pedagogy.

This pedagogical impulse is inevitable, if “the sentimental imagination at
its core manifests an irresistible impulse toward human connection;

sentimentalism in its pure essence envisions — indeed, desires - the self-in-

 

relation” (Dobson 170 emphasis in original); and the novel consistently shows the

home in relation to, even though separated from, the larger society. Thus, when

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Marmee must go to Washington, Jo braves the marketplace to sell a part of
herself — her hair - to pay for the train ticket. When Amy is punished physically
for an infraction of the rules at school, she is removed from that pubic
relationship to demonstrate that corporal punishment is not appropriate to the
kind of social ordering the sentimental agenda promotes. When Meg marries
John Brooke, her failure to be hospitable to one of his bachelor friends is
represented as her personal failure to maintain a properly hospitable parlor - that
one place where outsiders were supposed to be welcomed into one’s home and
where they could experience its civilizing effects. When Laurie is discovered to
be orphaned and living alone with his grandfather, he is “adopted” into the March
home where he is subject to the edifying effects of good women in a good family.
As a text in dialogue with its time and with its readers, Little Women
demonstrates both Alcott’s position on social realities as they relate to the family
as well as the socially constructed position such novels were expected to fulﬁll.

In each later incarnation of the story, the historical position of the novel
has been re-envisioned as social conditions change and as adapters interpret the
story for their contemporaries. To borrow Tony Bennett’s formulation, “the
signiﬁcance of how [Little Women is] now represented within discourses of power
and resistance depends on how [it was] earlier represented in such discourses”
(49). By 1933 those discourses of power and resistance had, to a degree,
imploded. Too many workers found themselves without the means to maintain a
reasonable standard of living, let alone to “resist" the inequities of a capitalist

system of production. Concomitantly, it was in the best interest of the empowered

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to suggest to the working class that everyone was suffering from the effects of
the Depression, and this was the standard message from Washington, DC. At
the same time, in corporate propaganda, on radio, in newspapers, on the silver
screen, in novels, in short stories, virtually every popular medium avoided
addressing the most pressing concerns of the day by focusing on the positive
aspects of living in America. Not all the media ignored the realities of the
Depression all the time; nevertheless, popular forms tended to present upbeat
depictions of the social and economic situation, even when they were critical of
the social realities of the day. While Little Women was not unabashedly “upbeat,”
neither did it directly address the social realities of 1933. However the
Depression left its mark on the adaptation — as did the history from which the
original story arose.

As noted in chapter 2, the opening of the 1933 RKO ﬁlm conflated visual
and aural images of the North and South, deﬂecting any focus on the Civil War
as such and contributing to a sense that all Americans were in the same boat
and should be committed to working out the problems of the day together. Here
the reality that there were still living veterans of the Civil War impinges on the
representation of the novel on screen, tying the modern ﬁlm to the past that gave
rise to it and inﬂecting the telling of the story with a sense, if only indirect, of the
discrepancies between the ﬁlm and lived reality. The image of a comfortable
family home also ties the ﬁlm to the past, an imagined past of the yeoman farmer
and “his” self-sufficient family within the self-sustaining small town. History, here,

becomes an interpretation of the past that will most comfortably sustain the

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reassuring image of the safe and secure home, a reaction, no doubt, to the fact
that more and more people were losing their homes because of the economic
emergency of the day.

While the ﬁlm evoked images of the past, it also incorporated elements of
its own social reality, imperfectly bound by the conﬁnes of the novel. All the older
women work - Marmee, Jo, and Meg - and this is presented as the natural
response of good women dealing with an emergency. It is also true that this
complies exactly with the novel. The ﬁrst half of the ﬁlm, especially, could even
be read as encouragement for women to willingly work outside the home. After
all, three of the women do so and still manage to maintain a suitable home
environment. What is almost completely eliminated in the ﬁlm, though, is the
presence of the father/husband. His convenient absence at the beginning of the
story, because of the war, is translated on ﬁlm into his ineffectuality. He says
almost nothing, even after he comes home, and he does even less. His position
within the household, however, is treated respectfully, and all of the girls express
the desire at one time or another to reproduce their own versions of their happy
childhood home — complete with husband to guide them and children for them to
guide. So in spite of the self-sufficiency the women exhibit while Father is away,
the ﬁlm ends with all the women but Beth married or engaged and on their way to
creating homes of their own in the manner of the novel.

The interpretation of Little Women produced by Heerman and Mason
inscribed home as a continuity over time. It was portrayed as the stabilizing

center of the women’s lives, especially, even as it suggested the disassembly of

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the original home in the service of creating new homes. In the novel that home
was depicted as the site of moral development; in the ﬁlm morality was still
treated as a virtue, but stability, both physical and personal, replaced moral
uprightness as the key concern. As a concomitant to the morality portrayed in the
novel, stability admirably complemented the original story while it acknowledged,
however indirectly, the exigencies of the 19305.

One other aspect of this ﬁlm bears comment here. The original story is
rightly classed with other sentimental/domestic novels, but in its ﬁlm incarnation it
was treated as a classic, just as the stories of Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, and
Shakespeare were treated as classics. Although Suzanne Clark’s assertion that
‘[h]igh modernism meant that the works of a few male writers stood for a whole
period of literary history” that “left women out of the literary canon (34) is a valid
concern, Little Women was treated by the ﬁlm studio with the same respect that
any of the other “classics” enjoyed. It was carefully cast and photographed; it had
its own original musical score; the screenwriters were among the best, even
winning an Oscar for their efforts; the screenplay attempted a high degree of
ﬁdelity to the novel. In the popular medium of ﬁlm, the academically disdained
“sentimental” was accorded a social place equal to that enjoyed by any of the
productions of the male writers ensconced in the American canon.

Although the academy had excised sentimental novels from the history of
literary production, corporate America, in the guise of the movie studio,
recognized them as a part of American social history, a part that could be

exploited to corporate advantage, to be sure, but a part that could also enhance

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the image of the studio. This is exactly what happened when the ﬁlm was
released. Katharine Hepburn was already recognized as a talented stage
actress, and her performance in the ﬁlm won her the Cannes Film Festival award
as best actress, and, as already noted, the screenwriters won an Oscar for their
adaptation. In much the same way that Alcott’s novel had been recognized by
reviewers of the day, this ﬁlm was recognized for its merits as a representation of
that novel. While public approbation for the ﬁlm did not (nor could it) suffice to
instate Alcott in the literary canon, it was sufﬁcient to assure that her literary
contribution to collective American history would remain vital. Her story,
transformed and yet retaining much of its original character, was insinuated into
current history and was thus revitalized as an informing reality in American
culture.

By 1949, the end of the Second World War had created its own set of
historical conditions that focused attention on the public concerns of re-
integrating returning soldiers into American society and “ﬁghting the spread of
communism.” These concerns made a story like Little Women useful in ways
that it had not been before. Its focus on the home was readily pressed into
service as a vehicle for promoting the idea that women should give up their jobs
for the returning soldiers and content themselves with keeping house for those
soldiers. Where the novel had suggested that women could exercise social
power from within the home - Alcott’s expression of domestic feminism - the film
suggested that women need only retreat to the home and let their men worry

about the outside world. In service of these notions, the ﬁlm was produced in

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color and in a style more akin to the elaborate Hollywood musical than to more
serious ﬁlms, whether those serious ﬁlms had happy endings or not. These
directorial decisions effectively reinterpreted the novel to suit the historical reality
of the year when the ﬁlm was produced, even though the screenplay was only
slightly altered from the one used in 1933. Thus, part of the historical reality of
the 1949 ﬁlm is the gloss on the novel inherent in the older screenplay. Instead of
beginning with the novel, this ﬁlm began with the earlier ﬁlm.

One of the changes in the 1949 screenplay is the way that consumerism is
enacted. The viewer actually sees the little women go on their shopping
expedition for Christmas presents for themselves, something that is only noted in
the novel and in the earlier screenplay. The effect of showing the girls in the
general store is twofold; it creates more sense of nostalgia for the “good old
days” of the general store, and it establishes more completely the outside world
of the marketplace. Showing a general store helps create a sense of community.
This is the store in the small town where everyone knows the neighbors and
where the storekeeper gives credit. This store also creates a sense of the
marketplace as manageable (or perhaps the word should be “containable”)
because it is portrayed as a place where everything a person might need, from
drawing pencils to hats, was available under one relatively small roof. The image
of the girls shopping also “sanitized” it. The marketplace that had threatened to
intrude on the nineteenth-century home here becomes more akin to a neighbor’s
house where one has gone to make a call. If shopping is like going visiting, it is a

safe activity for the girls and so the external marketplace, part of the outside

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world, is transformed into a space that women can negotiate safely and
reasonably. The consumer’s freedom to consume after the deprivations of the
Depression and the War is also transformed into something of a sacred trust.
While the initial impulse to spend is selﬁsh, the girls choose to turn their
consumption to the service to someone else by trading their things for gifts for
Marmee. Shopping thus is constituted as a concomitant to the home, a task
women undertake in order to reinforce the internal strength of the household by
providing necessary consumer goods for use by the household. (All of the gifts
for Marmee were necessities except for Amy’s gift of cologne which was
characterized as a justiﬁable luxury because it was not too expensive.)

In its insistent home-centered focus, this ﬁlm demanded that women seek
and ﬁnd their happiness only within the conﬁnes of their own homes (rather like
Dorothy’s realization in The Wizard of Oz that “There’s no place like home”). The
difference between this representation and the two earlier ones is not the focus
on the home, but the way that home encloses in inhabitants. The poor Hummels,
whom we see enjoying the March girls’ Christmas breakfast, are completely
contained within their rather miserable hovel. Laurie, until his honorary
membership in the March family, is contained within his grandfather’s grand
mansion. The March sisters and Marmee are equally contained within their
home. Even when the girls leave home, it is to other homes where they can be
appropriately held. Meg marries and sets up housekeeping; Amy marries and
moves into the mansion; Jo lives in Mrs. Kirke’s house while she tries her hand at

writing, eventually returning to Marmee and Father—until the Professor comes

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and they go off to create their own home. What Alcott had represented as
independent women whose homes constituted the world in microcosm (at least
the world as it should be), in the historical moment of post-WW ll America
becomes women who know when it is time to give up their independence and
stay home where they can teach their children to resist the political dangers of
the world outside. The notion of transforming the world from the hearth is evident
in both formulations, as are their very different emphases.

With the 1994 version of Little Women, there is a clear attempt to break
with past adaptations and create a completely “nevv’ ﬁlm. In this version, the
novel is treated more as a resource for episodes than as the actual basis of the
film. There are scenes which might be considered borrowings from the earlier
films, such as the visit to the opera; however, these scenes are either sufﬁciently
modernized or else visually altered to make them seem different from the earlier
versions. The rest of the ﬁlm is a pastiche of incidents from the novel and
borrowings from Alcott’s journals arranged to realize the world from a woman’s
perspective. This perspective is read as a feminist rendition of the story, yet the
ﬁlm does a better job of promoting domesticity than feminism. Alcott’s vision of
domestic feminism becomes, in this instance, a late twentieth-century romantic
vision of happily-ever-after.

In the attempt to make this ﬁlm true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the
novel, many of the material realities of the nineteenth century are incorporated
into the screenplay. The audience is treated to the sight of Jo kneading bread

and covered in ﬂour. Meg has to bathe her babies in a tub on the kitchen table,

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without beneﬁt of running water. Women’s skirts actually get muddy when the
women walk outside in the rain. Outdoor scenes in the winter feature red noses
and people’s breath on the air. Going upstairs to bed means carrying a candle to
light the way. These function in a similar manner to the general store in the 1949
film; they create a sense of nostalgia for the past, but a nostalgia that embraces
the past selectively. Generally, women will agree with Jo that long skirts are a
nuisance; some will consider bread-baking a similar nuisance, while others will
see it as an art worth reviving. All of these, as well as the other material markers
in the ﬁlm, contribute to a sense of realism: This is how things “realljr” were in the
mid-nineteenth century, even though these material realities were peripheral to
the message in the novel. Nevertheless, a history of “realistic” ﬁlms has made
these markers a part of the ﬁlm idiom, and even the less desirable of these
historical realities lend a romantic air to the ﬁlm. This move makes the film
correspond more closely with the romantic aspects of the book but without
enhancing its correspondence with the domestic feminism that informed the
novel. At every turn, what appear to be feminist moves - or at least
modernizations of an old-fashioned story - ﬁnish as afﬁrmations of nineteenth-
century sentimental notions, privileging those ideas and giving them determinant
power in a modern narrative.

In this ﬁlm, the complex relationship between literature and history
contributes to an artifact that is neither really the story of Little Women nor really

the ﬁctionalized biography of Louisa May Alcott.1 The screenwriter's use of

 

1 This is true of any ﬁlm adapted from a novel, but it is especially evident in this ﬁlm which tries to
incorporate Alcott’s journals into her ﬁctionalized account of her family.

131

Alcott’s journals lends an air of authenticity to the story but at the expense of
being “true” to the novel, and the free-wheeling re-arrangement of episodes from
the novel does the same. Envisioning the nineteenth century as a time when, for
example, respectable single women could kiss men in the wings of opera
theaters requires that the audience suspend disbelief not in the story being told
but in the'history being portrayed. Alternatively, it assumes that the audience will
not be sufficiently aware of the conventions of respectable nineteenth-century
behavior to recognize the anomaly. Either way, at these sorts of junctures, the
story becomes more Robin Swicord’s than Louisa Alcott’s; and the history within
which the original story was written, the “actual” past, enters into dialogue (an
exchange) with the past as interpreted for a modern audience.

The process of renewing an old story for successive generations involves
continual re-visioning of the past within the realities of present history. In the
process, some elements of the re-visioned past acquire the aura of elements of
the present and some elements are elided, essentially eliminated from the
present understanding of the past. One example of this is Alcott’s treatment of
immigrants. Throughout the novel, these outsiders serve as tropes for both the
good and bad things about newcomers to the US, particularly as those outsiders
are portrayed as becoming Americanized (Professor Bhaer) or not (the
Hummels). These many references are reduced in the ﬁlms to only a couple of
scenes, some of which make reference to the immigrants rather than showing
them. In the 1933 and 1949 ﬁlms, for example, the Hummels are only shown

enjoying the Christmas breakfast the girls give up. The Professor has his scenes

132

in New York while he gets to know Jo and the ﬁnal scene where he proposes. By
1994, the Hummels are, literally, out of the picture; all the audience gets is the
girls carrying the food and singing about going “awassailing” (with the exception
of Beth’s last visit where she holds the sick baby and contracts scarlet fever).
However, the Professor is given more screen time and the opportunity to
encourage Jo to enter into an intellectual debate and promote woman suffrage.
No longer the outsider regarded with suspicion, the Professor, as the trope for
the foreigner, is now the exotic, and therefore desirable, other.

Louis Althusser posited Institutional State Apparatuses (lSAs), such as
school, church, and family, and Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs), such as
armies, police, and courts, as the means by which subjects/citizens learn their
place in society, learn the ideology informing their culture, and pass that
knowledge on to their offspring. However, what might be termed Popular State
Apparatuses (PSAs) can have as much or more inﬂuence on the attitudes and
beliefs of those subjects than either the lSAs or the RSAs, in part because PSAs
appear to function outside of hegemonic consthcts. Popular commodities, such
as films and novels, may incorporate many of the same ideas promoted by ISAs
and RSAs; however, resistance to these ideas also appears. Consumers who
agree with the dominant ideology will reject the resistant ideas while those who
disagree with it may well embrace resistance. Because the producers of
commodities have very little control over what consumers Q with their products,
the mere act of producing consumer goods introduces the possibility of

resistance. This is not to suggest that Althusser’s characterization of the way any

133

society functions is ﬂexible enough to theorize life in the twenty-ﬁrst century.
Rather it is to suggest that all state apparatuses, by virtue of their insertion in
history, are subject to the same sorts of use modiﬁcation that popular artifacts
are.

Besides the uses of popular commodities made by consumers, there is
the additional complex relationship between the commodity and its producer. The
market relationship between production and consumption is always a factor;
consumer products are produced with the intent of making a proﬁt for the
producer. In the case of a novel (or other “re-manufactured” goods), the producer
first must function as a consumer of the product, determining her or his
relationship to the commodity before deciding how to modify the commodity for
consumption by others. Even if Little Women were not such a malleable text,
each reader (consumer) of the novel brings to the reading a quite personal set of
attitudes and assumptions that will color the reading. The understanding
engendered by that reading will determine the uses to which the reader will put
the novel. Thus an adapter who responds to the feminist possibilities in the novel
will reproduce those possibilities in his or her adaptation. The consumers of the
adaptation, in turn, will respond to this new text based on their own positioning,
culturally, socially, and personally, as well as their understanding of the original.

Alcott produced Little Women as a means to an end: earning money. The
autobiographical basis for much of the text makes this more a commodity, In
some ways, than a completely fictitious story would be because Alcott sells

herself, in a sense, when she sells this story. After the fact, she has her own text

134

as the basis for the later books she writes that follow the later careers of the
Marches as well as their offspring, both natural and adopted. In order to write
these later stories, she must make use of her own earlier production, and she
does so in ways that reclaim something of her text from her audience. Most
particularly, she subverts the wishes of her readers by refusing to have Jo marry
Laurie in the “Good Wives” section of Little Women. As both producer and
consumer of her own work, she imposes her own interpretation/understanding of
her earlier work on her later ones.

The more obviously feminist aspects of her work demonstrate more of this
complexity. While Alcott championed a somewhat radical form of feminism, this
was blended so carefully into her popular productions that it could easily be read
as support for the “status quo.” For example, when Jo rants about wishing she
had been born a man and not pinning up her hair if that meant becoming an adult
woman, Meg sets her straight with a few well-chosen words. The net message is
that the way things are is the way things should be. Women have their place and
men have theirs and they shouldn’t envy each other any of their unique
privileges. Alcott’s production of a resisting female in the person of Jo is
tempered by her own consumption of the popular ideology of her own day.
Ultimately, Alcott makes Jo the meta-Mother of the narrative, the woman who
can mother the neediest of boys, including a “little quadroon.” The domestic
fiction ends by indeed being able to reform the world from the home, even if that
home is a boarding school for boys; and Jo is able to be a “true” woman even as

“the wise Professor steer[s] her safely into calmer waters” (Alcott 469). More than

135

133 years after the novel was first published, film versions of the story continue
to promote the notion that woman’s place is in the home. Despite the many nods
to changed mores and fashions, the little women always end up the married or
engaged women in love whose ﬁrst and last thought is the wonderful homes they
will create with their chosen companions.

No single theory is expansive enough to explain how ideologies move
through time, how they retain certain characteristics, and how they change over
time. What is clear from this examination is that change is not a neat linear
progression from point A to point B but rather that it is a dialectic process in the

Marxian sense that, by its nature, involves conﬂict and contradiction.

136

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