Marriage as an Economic Proposition in Little Women (2019)
アカデミックライティングの授業で書いたエッセイを公開します。
2019年公開のグレタ・ガーウィグ版若草物語での女性にとっての経済問題としての結婚について取り上げました。
文法の間違いや論の展開が変だったりしますが、今後の語学力向上のために晒します。
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Marriage as an Economic Proposition in Little Women (2019)
A woman stands at the door of an office. We hear her breathe deeply, then she jumps into the world of men, and she brings a newspaper editor her script to sell her novel. The woman, Jo March, is the one of most famous female characters in literature and this is the first scene of the movie, Little Women (2019), a new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, which was originally published in two parts in 1868 and 1869. The screenwriter and director is Greta Gerwig, who is only the fifth woman ever to be nominated for an academy award for best director for her first movie, Lady Bird (2017). Gerwig reinvented the classic story, Little Women, for a new generation by focusing on financial independence for women.
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is classified as a semi-autobiographical novel. Its first part, which depicts the growth of teenage sisters―Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy living in genteel poverty in Massachusetts in the 1860s―was a smash hit both commercially and critically. The second part was titled Good Wives and shows the end of girlhood and the start of adulthood, beginning with Meg’s marriage. After that, the story describes the death of Beth; the marriage of Amy and Laurie, who is a rich boy living next door to the March girls and is Jo’s best friend; and finally, Jo’s marriage to an old German man, Professor Bhaer. There are two sequels, and in these books Jo and Professor Bhaer have two boys and run a boarding school for boys.
The novel, Little Women has been translated into many languages, and has been frequently adapted for stage and screen all over the world. Mori (2020) explained that most of adaptations in the US and the UK represent the story as a Bildingsroman, a loud and wild tomboy grows up to a respectable married woman through various difficulties, and it has been related with feminism. Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation also describes women’s life from a feminist perspective as before, but she will not force Jo get married with anyone. The change from the original novel and other adaptations indicate that Gerwig has a very clear and strong message about the relationship between marriage and female financial independence in her movie.
The famous opening of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s prominent romantic novel published in 1813, gives us a better understanding of the connection between marriage and female independence in the 19th century.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
(Austen, Pride and Prejudice)
This part has been interpreted as great irony. In Austen’s era women had only limited rights and could not inherit property. Therefore, it was considered an imperative for an underprivileged woman to marry a well-off man. Thus, “a truth universally acknowledged” casts light on the true nature of marriage―it is a strategy for women to survive in patriarchal society.
In the latest adaptation of Little Women, marriage as the financial strategy is carried out in the storyline of Amy, who used to be depicted as a childish character and was often misunderstood. While sacrifice is the important theme throughout the book, Amy seemed to be more spoiled than other older sisters because she could accompany her Aunt March to Europe instead of Jo without trying. To pursue Amy’s behavior deeply, however, the new movie suggests that she was conscious of her duty to marry a rich man through her childhood anxieties and understanding of adulthood practicalities. Amy insists clearly that she is not ashamed of her desire to marry a rich man because marriage is an economic proposition. This is reflected in Rao’s (2019) observation, that “As an adult, Amy’s pursuit of wealth matures into one driven not by materialistic self-interest, but by a realistic view of how the world operates.”
In contrast to Amy, Jo’s strategy of marriage is much more complicated in the new Little Women. When Jo attempted to sell the novel about her life and her sisters―it is titled exactly Little Women―to an old editor, he insists that the heroine must get married to someone in the end. He said, “Girls want to see women married,” and ” If you end your delightful book with your heroine a spinster, no one will buy it. It won’t be worth printing.” Eventually, Jo agreed to the change in exchange for 6.6 percent royalties and the ownership of her own copyright. As a result, in the ending of her novel we are served an exaggerated and emotional romantic fantasy in which Professor Bhaer kisses Jo in the rain. It is obvious that this metafiction structure reflects Louisa May Alcott’s life, who never married and whose work based on her own life achieved commercial success. Using the prejudice and the stereotype of female characters in the 19th century, Gerwig brilliantly turns marriage into the advantage for negotiation. In this way, Gerwig points out the marriage strategy by unmarried female artist, which had been overlooked.
Consequently, Little Women in 2019 reveals that marriage was certainly inseparable from women in patriarchal capitalist society even from unmarried women. While the fact leads to suppress various ways to live for women, Gerwig represents their strategies of how to establish financial independence in the restriction. Especially the new story of Jo shows a disturbance of the historical framework－creativity has been characterized as masculine, not as feminine. As this constructed true means women’s role was within the domestic sphere, which was closely intertwined with amateur art, they were struggling to gain recognition within the professional art world. Giving the unequal fact, it is remarkable that a spinster wins success as a professional writer in the new Little Women.
According to the interview of The Economist, Gerwig referenced the famous essay Room of One’s Own (1929) which written by the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf and said that, “to write you need a Room of One’s Own and money. She (Woolf) said you need money. And she said the question is not why are there no great women writers, the question is why have women always poor. Because poetry depends upon intellectual freedom and intellectual freedom depends upon material things.” Gerwig always has conscious of material things, and this is the reason why the classic story vividly revives in 2019.
References
Austen, J. (1813). Pride and Prejudice.
Gerwig, G (2019). Little Women (screenplay).
https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/little-women-by-greta-gerwig.pdf
Mori, A. (2020). Little Women on Screen : What the Film Adaptations of the Little Women Series Have Not Depicted[スクリーンの中の『若草物語』 ―映画・アニメ版『若草物語』が描かなかったもの―]. Journal of College of World Englishes, 25, 31-47.
Rao, S. (2019, Dec 26). Greta Gerwig’s ‘Little Women’ understands Amy March, The Washington Post.
The Economist Radio (2019, Dec 21). The Economist Asks: Greta Gerwig. The Economist (Podcast).
https://play.acast.com/s/theeconomistasks/theeconomistasks-gretagerwig
