Why the new Little Women adaptation is more than just a film for females
My sister-in-law confesses that she is nervous about the Greta Gerwig adaptation of Little Women, in cinemas from Boxing Day. In her family of women, the 1994 film starring Winona Ryder is a Christmas tradition; another version will, she fears, inevitably disappoint. Having just seen the new film, starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen as the sisters Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth March, I assured her there was nothing to worry about. The rave reviews are pouring in, and to the universal acclaim I can add my own: this clever, spirited, witty adaptation is pure pleasure from start to finish. Furthermore, it serves as a timely reminder of just how feminist the original novel, published in two parts in 1868 and 1869, was.
“When I read it at 30 I couldn’t believe it, I felt like I’d never read it before,” Gerwig told the New Yorker. “I couldn’t believe how modern it was, how strange it was, how spiky it was. I’d allowed it to become this snowglobe of sweetness, and it was nothing like that. It was much more complicated.”
Lines that Gerwig has used from the original novel include the girls’ mother Marmee’s “I’m angry almost every day of my life” (of course she was, Gerwig has noted: she was a woman in the 19th century) and aspiring painter Amy’s insistence: “I want to be great or nothing.” Little Women is, essentially, a story about raising intelligent, ambitious, creative girls at a time when society consistently undervalued them, a fact to which the title specifically alludes. Heroine Jo desperately wants to be a writer but is under pressure to marry and improve her family’s fortunes. “Women have minds and souls as well as hearts, ambition and talent as well as just beauty, and I’m sick of being told that love is all a woman is fit for,” Jo says in the film.
It is ironic, then, that despite having produced one of the best films of the year, Gerwig has been snubbed for her efforts, dismaying many film critics. She was not nominated for a Golden Globe in the best director category, which this year, yet again, features only men. Nor was she shortlisted for best screenplay, despite having intelligently rewritten the story as a non-chronological dual narrative that switches between the sisters’ girlhoods and womanhoods, before she introduces a third narrative strain that erodes the boundaries between fact and fiction while commenting shrewdly on itself.
Look away if you don’t want spoilers, but Gerwig gives Jo a book. Alcott’s novel ends with Jo, having got married and become a mother, giving up writing and founding a school. In real life, Alcott became a famous author, writing later of her heroine Jo that “she should have become a literary spinster”. Gerwig blended the two narratives to create a sort of meta-fiction, gifting Alcott’s heroine the ending that she – and perhaps Alcott – were both prevented from writing (in the film, Jo is told by her publisher, in a guise that could equally be that of a Hollywood mogul, that “if the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end”).
Perhaps it is Gerwig’s affinity with the March sisters, via the struggle to be a woman artist, that makes her adaptation of Little Women so good. Gerwig’s partner, Noah Baumbach, is also a director, and although their work together has involved collaboration and Baumbach has been vocal about her influence on his work, she has been consistently cast as his muse. Furthermore, Little Women gets to the heart of which stories continue to be perceived as important and worthy of intellectual inquiry and interpretation. This is why I sense that Gerwig may have anticipated the snub, and may even have baked its underpinnings into the text of the film. “It’s just about our little life,” says Jo, of the new writing she is producing. “Who will be interested in a story of domestic struggles and joys? It doesn’t have any real importance.”
“Maybe,” says her sister Amy, “We don’t see these things as important because people don’t write about them.”
We have come some way to reconciling the domestic when it comes to artistic and literary output, of accepting that stories in such a setting are human stories worthy of being told, even if the protagonists are female. (Because, while women are constantly required to imagine themselves from the viewpoint of a male character, men are rarely expected to surrender the default, and even when they are encouraged to do so will often be resistant.) We have writers such as Elena Ferrante to thank for this ever-increasing acceptance, though we must remember those who dispiritingly insisted that this anonymous author of world-class skill must be a man masquerading as a woman.
Women’s stories continue to be written off, to be denied the status of high art. Gerwig knows it, just as any woman who writes novels, or makes art or directs films knows it. Like Jo, you have to fight hard for recognition. I have no doubt that many men will refuse to go and see this film, but those who do, or who are press-ganged into it by excited daughters, will find it brimming with humanity. It is hard not to be moved by the “little women’s” ongoing struggle to be included in that category, or by the thought of all the little girls who will see it, this book I have loved since I was six and which has been reinvented for a new generation, that tells them: “What you want is valid and important.”
I don’t know when my sister-in-law will get a chance now: she has just given birth to a daughter. No doubt one day they will watch it together, and it will show her that her dreams and ambitions can be greater and more soaring than Louisa May Alcott, trapped in the 19th century and kicking against it, could ever have hoped.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
committed to planting 1m hectares, but meanwhile the ancient Gran Chaco in the north continues to vanish, replaced by huge fields of soy to feed the farm animals of the world.
Cameroon, which holds part of the precious Congo basin rainforest, is offering to create 12m hectares of tree cover by 2030, but since 1990 more than 20% of Cameroon’s forests have been cut down to make way for subsistence farmers and now, increasingly, for banana and palm oil plantations, to create products that end up in our supermarket shopping baskets. Nigeria may feel better about itself after pledging to plant a million hectares, but the fact is that over the last 25 years it has lost more than 10 times that amount, more than half its forests. For a number of years it even had the highest deforestation rate in the world, but it was overtaken this year by Ghana, where cocoa bean crops for our chocolate are replacing the rainforests.
And let’s not dwell too long on the countries where the rate of loss is just as high and dramatic but are not even bothering to sign up to Bonn such as Bolivia (80,000 square kilometres gone between 1990 and 2015), North Korea (33,000), Paraguay (58,000) and Indonesia (a breathtaking 275,000km – an area larger than New Zealand).
Even the apparently cheering news that global tree cover is growing is less than it seems, explains Tim Rayden of the Oxford Forestry Institute. “There is a big difference between tree cover and forests.” A large number of countries, for example, are planning to fill their commitments with commercial plantations – but plantations, which are harvested every 10 years or more regularly, are very much less effective than tropical forests at capturing carbon. He points to recent research where scientists worked out the carbon capture potential of three different reforestation scenarios under the terms of the Bonn challenge. If the 350m hectares of reforestation are all natural forest, they can capture as much as 42 petagrams of carbon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes that to keep global warming below 1.5C 199 petagrams must be removed from the atmosphere this century, so that is a significant contribution from the world’s forests.
However, if the trajectory of the plans already submitted carries on, at least 45% of that cover will be commercial plantation. If our natural forests are protected under that scenario, the storage potential will be 16 petagrams. But if we continue to chop into them in the same way that we do at present, the storage potential will dwindle to just three petagrams.
We wipe out whatever is complex and other and difficult to manage, and replace it with nice, easy farms and plantations full of monocultures of pigs and corn and wheat and palm oil. We like things nice and simple and symmetrical and easy to control, that’s the problem.
One possible attempt to staunch some of the flow that is being seriously considered in the EU is a due diligence law. France already has a law that places a civil liability on large companies that fail to monitor their supply chains for human rights and environment issues, and support for Europe-wide regulation – although not necessarily in that form – is coming from the oddest quarters such as Nestlé and Mondelez.
There are other green shoots of optimism too. Consumers are increasingly aware of the problem, according to Chris West of the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York. Politicians know that something has to change. Brazil, for example, came in for serious criticism over the Amazon fires during the Madrid climate change talks. In many ways, say campaigners, the terrible Amazon fires last summer have helped to focus the world’s attention on these incredibly precious living organisms that we take so very much for granted.
But, as usual with this environment lark, there is a dangerous time lag between becoming aware of the problem and stopping it from happening. Trees may quite literally grow on trees (all right, just beneath them). But they grow slowly – and fall before the axes so quickly.
• Bibi van der Zee is a Guardian journalist