This was in large part born of necessity women had far fewer opportunities to earn decent money, usually forced to unskilled labor. Alcott herself said she wrote “Little Women” “at record speed for money” while men toiled away on epics like “Moby-Dick” that would fail to generate much income. There’s some truth in the notion that women strove to write works that would sell - Ms. Baym noted, Nathaniel Hawthorne, for one, complained in 1855 about the “damned mob of scribbling women” whose inexplicably popular work he feared would hurt his own book sales. But that widespread appeal was used to slight the genre out of hand and further relegate it to the status of mere entertainment. That doesn’t mean American women’s fiction wasn’t popular - like “Little Women,” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” could barely keep up with demand after its 1852 publication. Nineteenth-century men of letters “saw the matter of American experience as inherently male,” the literary critic Nina Baym wrote in her 1981 essay “Melodramas of Beset Manhood.” It was a complete negation of women’s points of view, not just an artistic dismissal.
![little women film little women film](https://cdn.dnaindia.com/sites/default/files/styles/full/public/2020/01/28/891388-little-women-india-release.jpg)
The predominantly white and male guardianship of the literary and intellectual high ground tended to view the essential American story as a solo confrontation with the wilderness, not a love triangle or intimate domestic saga. While their female British counterparts - Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, for example - were considered giants on the literary landscape, in the United States a different spirit ruled.
![little women film little women film](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/little-women-clare-niederpruem.jpg)
![little women film little women film](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/EIpTouhFn7oPzh0pfsxFmdLNUxY=/0x0:772x438/1200x800/filters:focal(325x158:447x280)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/52117553/Screen_Shot_2016_12_02_at_2.19.53_PM.0.png)
At that time American women’s novels were not most critics’ idea of “serious” writing. Alcott’s book was first published in 1868, it was an instant success - it was favorably reviewed by many of the top magazines and has never gone out of print - but that made it an outlier. In 2019, this attitude seems like history repeating itself. She also described the movie’s “problem with men” as “very real.” Someone tweeted in response: “It’s not a ‘problem.’ We just don’t care.” The New York Times critic Janet Maslin recently tweeted her surprise at the “active hostility about ‘Little Women’ from men I know, love and respect.”
LITTLE WOMEN FILM MOVIE
While the box office numbers following its release on Wednesday suggest the movie has found a decent audience - it placed third, behind the new “Star Wars” and the latest “Jumanji,” on opening day - that unconscious bias has seemed to trickle down to the casual male viewer as well, if Twitter is any indication. The film has been lauded by critics and ostensibly possesses many of the qualities awards voters look for: an A-list cast (including Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet and Meryl Streep) a respected actress-turned-director (Greta Gerwig) and beloved source material.īut so far it has been noticeably underrepresented during awards season - two Golden Globe nominations and zero Screen Actors Guild nods - and Vanity Fair described the audiences at early advance screenings as “overwhelmingly comprised of women.” One of its producers, Amy Pascal, told the magazine she believes many male voters have avoided it because of an “unconscious bias.” So reads the headline for an article on Vanity Fair’s website this month about the latest screen adaptation of the beloved Louisa May Alcott novel. March’s love for her daughters is consistently upheld as an ideal that the March girls long to achieve both in their romantic lives and in themselves when they go on to become mothers.“‘Little Women’ Has a Little Man Problem.”
![little women film little women film](https://www.mountainfilm.org/files/images/films/MF16-STILL-Pink_Boy1_0.jpg)
Working in tandem with this notion of romantic love is the notion of familial love – motherly love in particular. By the end of Part 2, all of the March girls (with the exception of Beth) have found their way to true love. (These plays can be seen as a reflection of the way romantic love was viewed in the 19th century – they represent an ideal that even Jo aspires to, even if she chafes against conventional femininity.) Laurie, the rich boy next door, offers Jo her first lessons in love, and helps her come to better understand what she’s looking for in a successful marriage. The girls’ idealized notions of romantic love are embodied in Jo’s picaresque plays, in which swooning damsels find true love in spite of their hardships. The book can be seen as a record of the March girls’ progression from an innocent, idealized vision of love to a more complex, worldly understanding of it by the end of the novel. In Little Women, the March girls learn about the importance of love, both familial and romantic.