Little Women Sunday
Feb. 6th, 2022 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Today seemed like a good time to start because we just got through the MOST DRAMATIC chapter in the book, by which of course I mean the chapter where Amy BURNS JO'S BOOK and Jo in retaliation doesn't tell Amy about the weak ice in the river, and Amy falls through it and ALMOST DIES.
Critics give nineteenth century novels a lot of guff for their focus on teaching their heroines to control their tempers, but honestly I think it's much more noteworthy just how much temper these heroines get to display in the first place. How many novelists today would have the guts to have a girl burn her older sister's prized possession in a fit of temper? Or to have said older sister retaliate in a way that might have got her little sister killed? (Or an Anne of Green Gables style "breaking a slate over that obnoxious boy's head," for that matter.)
I think a lot of modern day people are theoretically in favor of "women's anger," but not actually in favor of the real fruits of losing one's temper, or prepared to think particularly deeply about the fact that women (just like men) sometimes get angry for reasons that are neither just nor righteous. (Ask anyone working retail.)
Anyway! I just recently watched the 1934 Katherine Hepburn adaptation, which cuts this scene entirely. (I still haven't seen the 1949 adaptation, but it's on the docket.) In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Amy Boyd Rioux complains that the Hepburn adaptation shortchanges Jo's writing career, which I don't agree with - we actually see quite a lot of that, including Jo's entire melodramatic Christmas play that she and her sisters put on for the neighbors. What the movie ends up cutting are scenes like Amy's burning of Jo's book, which focus on the more complicated aspects of relationships between the sisters.
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Date: 2022-02-06 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-06 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-06 10:43 pm (UTC)Maya Hawke plays Jo and Kathryn Newton plays Amy.
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Date: 2022-02-06 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-02-06 11:17 pm (UTC)Natasha would totally be Jo then! LOL
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Date: 2022-02-06 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-06 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-06 11:41 pm (UTC)Anyway, the Clint-Natasha story is almost a reverse of Jo-Laurie. Clint brings Natasha in from the cold... whereas in Little Women, it's JO bringing Laurie in from the cold to the literal warmth of the family circle.
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Date: 2022-02-06 11:56 pm (UTC)Aww, yeah! That was the one thing I liked about his sudden Old McBarton background, that Laura was going to name her kid after Natasha and she's "Auntie Nat."
Jo does that with Bhaer too -- that's the ending of the story before the time jump: that was the crowning moment of both their lives, when, turning from the night and storm and loneliness to the household light and warmth and peace waiting to receive them, with a glad “Welcome home!” Jo led her lover in, and shut the door. (The March family keeps assimilating the outsider men....)