A few weeks ago, I was asked by a notable British arts podcast (you can probably guess the one) to appear on an episode about Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The request capped a summer that began with a breathless read of a novel with one of those covers that appears absolutely everywhere, Ann Napolitano’s Oprah-approved Hello Beautiful. I haven’t read any Napolitano before and didn’t know anything about the book other than what I’d gleaned from an interview with the author I’d heard on a podcast. She’d talked about the familial bonds that the book probed, and the Chicago setting, and the book’s interest in basketball—but I hadn’t realized what the book’s inside cover proudly proclaimed: that it was (and I quote) “an exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott’s timeless classic Little Women.”
The word homage is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this jacket copy; what Hello Beautiful shares with Little Women is four sisters and a guy who kind of messes things up between them. Napolitano’s sisters aren’t carbon copies of the Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Fittingly for our modern age, Napolitano’s book is concerned with intergenerational hurt, while Alcott’s is (I would argue) about growing up without losing yourself. Napolitano’s sisters do discuss Little Women within the text. They argue over which Padavano sister is which March sister, and in particular, which one of them is Beth (when we all know: Claire Danes is Beth). To determine which one of them is Beth is to determine which one of them will (SPOILER) die first, which becomes a theme of the book.
But beyond that, the resonances with Alcott’s novel are few. I would argue that Hello Beautiful is less an homage to Little Women than an interpolation of Alcott’s novel (and a business-savvy interpolation, at that, considering the success of Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film adaptation). In music, an interpolation is not a cover, but a song that lifts a melody from another song (usually an extremely recognizable melody) and re-records it rather than sampling. Think Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” and its weird/wonderful use of “My Favorite Things,” or the way that “Rocket Man” obliquely turns up in the chorus of Elton John and Dua Lipa’s “Cold Heart.” (Can you interpolate yourself? Sir Elton says absolutely!)
Napolitano’s novel is a familiar melody (four sisters! loving/hating each other! with a guy circulating among them and kind of ruining everything!) played on an entirely new set of instruments: the children’s Bildungs/Künstlerroman novel becomes what today’s publishing marketers might call upmarket women’s fiction. The mode of transformation in Napolitano’s is far less linear than in Alcott’s. Traumas repeat themselves across generations in Hello Beautiful. In Alcott’s book—which we must remember was written in the Christian pedagogical vein of the text it’s most indebted to, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—each chapter gives each of our sisters a problem to face and a lesson to learn. The trauma of your father being away at war, or your sister becoming desperately ill with scarlet fever, or even not having the things that other girls have at school (those pickled limes!): these are events to learn from, opportunities for self-mastery. Marmee is angry every day of her life, but she learns control.
Little Women endures, I think, because of the moments in Alcott’s text when the journey from not knowing to knowing, or angry to not angry, or envious to content, or single to married are interrupted. It’s a rebellious, unruly book in many ways, despite its superficial sanctimoniousness. Jo’s refusal to marry Laurie is the book’s most infamous moment of rebellion—against tropes, against expectations for women, and against the desires of readers. Famously, Alcott wrote in her journal while penning the second half of the book, “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman's life. I won't marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.”
But there are other smaller refusals as well: Meg can never quite get over her envy of other women’s fine dresses and lovely houses after marrying the pretty awful John Brooke. Beth is the ultimate good girl; she does everything right, but she dies anyway. Amy is kind of a jerk but still ends up going to Europe and becoming an artist and marrying Laurie. Jo is told to stop writing lurid romance stories by the preachy Prof. Bhaer, but it’s the lurid romance stories that make money! And Marmee’s still angry, every single day. LITTLE REBELLIONS EVERYWHERE.
Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle have called these moments the book’s “smart ambivalence about womanhood.” This ambivalence expresses itself on many levels: characters are ambivalent, of course, but so is the text toward its own generic underpinnings as a “girls’ story.” The unruliness of Little Women is what makes it great, and it’s also what makes it endlessly interpolable. Pick at any of its many threads and yank: you’ll be able to turn the garment into whatever you want it to be.
Take, for instance, Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film Little Women. Gerwig’s script chooses to pick apart Jo’s artistic ambitions, which in the novel are mostly suppressed (smothered?) once Jo decides to marry Prof. Bhaer and set up her school for boys at Plumfield. In Gerwig’s telling, Jo follows the advice of Bhaer and Beth to give up her sensation stories and write something authentic and true; the result is a book called Little Women, and, possibly, not marriage? It’s ambiguous.
Gerwig’s Little Women pulls at the thread of the fictional Jo’s artistic ambitions and conflates them with the nonfictional Louisa’s story to say something about the double bind of the woman artist. Remember America Ferrera’s Barbie monologue? “It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.” Saoirse Ronan’s Jo gets her own version here: “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it.”
Louisa never married. Louisa wrote a book about her childhood and her sisters and became famous for it. So in the movie, Jo gets a version of Louisa’s ending. It’s not what we might call a faithful adaptation (which is a subject for another newsletter!), but it’s a fantastic interpolation of the autobiographical elements of the novel licensed by Alcott herself.
For Alcott once wrote, to explain to readers the parts of her book that were true and the parts that were not,
Facts in the stories that are true, though often changed as to time and place:–
"Little Women"–The early plays and experiences; Beth's death; Jo's literary and Amy's artistic experiences; Meg's happy home; John Brooke and his death; Demi's character. Mr. March did not go to the war, but Jo did. Mrs. March is all true, only not half good enough. Laurie is not an American boy, though every lad I ever knew claims the character. He was a Polish boy, met abroad in 1865. Mr. Lawrence is my grandfather, Colonel Joseph May. Aunt March is no one.
So here, Louisa is Jo and Jo is Louisa. And Jo is every girl who ever had an imagination to big for her writing garret. Jo is Anne Shirley. (Have you ever noticed how the film Anne of Avonlea straight up plagiarizes from Little Women? This bothered me SO MUCH as a kid. And now I’ve been vindicated by Youtube!) Jo is Lila and Elena. Jo is Shamyla.
I love Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version of Little Women as an adaptation (Christian Bale! Kirsten Dunst! Claire Frickin’ Danes’ crying face!), and I really like Gerwig’s 2019 version as an interpolation. It’s an interpolation licensed by the text itself and by the facts of its creation. Female auteurs like Gerwig and Alcott and Jo March should be free to manipulate and to invent in the same way that male auteurs always have.
The most brilliant manipulation of Gerwig’s Little Women is the way her script plays with the book’s timeline to solve the “problem” of Jo not marrying Laurie. The book we now know as Little Women was originally two books, one published in 1868 and one the next year. Maybe it should still be read and published that way, because a lot of readers have trouble with the second half and, in particular, with its unsatisfying marriage plots. Gerwig fixes this by starting with the second half of the book and then flashing back to the first part. We meet Bhaer (who is younger, taller, and French-er than his book counterpart) before Laurie. We see Jo living her best writer life in New York before we have a vision of her cozy, nicknamey friendship with her cute neighbor. By telling the story in this order, we see that Jo’s baby is her book (which is exactly how Alcott referred to Little Women with her family). The best interpolations rely on the reader-listener’s familiarity with an original text or tune to earn two responses at once: familiarity and discomfort. That’s exactly what Gerwig’s Little Women does.
Your own interpolation may vary. Maybe you prefer the stark realism of Geraldine Brooks’ March, a novel that mashes up the real Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa) with the fictional Mr. March to tell a prehistory of the book’s gentle patriarch. Maybe you want a modern-day romance, or a graphic novel retelling, or Marmee’s side of the story. Maybe you want Napolitano’s women’s fiction version of the four-sisters plot from Hello Beautiful, with its duelling Jos. Heck, even Sex and the City could be considered its own kind of retelling.
What might Louisa May Alcott think of her book’s enduring afterlife? Upon commencing work on the “girls’ story” requested by her editor, she famously (grumpily) wrote in her journal, “So I plod away, though I don't enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.” Her own ambivalence becomes that of her characters, and it draws us to her tale. But we risk wresting control of the narrative away from Alcott if we look only to this journal entry to understand the unruliness of her novel. For when she went to publish her journals after her fame had been secured, she followed this insouciant, almost pettish entry with a two-word annotation from her older self to her younger version:
“Good joke.”
SUGGESTED READING
Want to think more about Little Women? Here are some of the best places to start:
“No One Likes Meg” by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle.
“Little Women and the Marmee Problem” by Sarah Blackwood.
Anne Boyd’s Meg, Jo, Beth & Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters.
John Matteson’s The Annotated Little Women.
Thanks for reading The Booklight. What’s your favorite Little Women adaptation or remix? I’d love to know about it in the comments! In two weeks, I’ll be writing about female artists (Taylor! Beyoncé! Mary Shelley!) and the aesthetics of excess. Until then. x