The Present Reshaping the Past Reshaping the Present: Film Versions of Little Women

Abstract

Elaine Showalter has described Alcott’s Little Women as “the American female myth” that has “shaped the lives of women of many times and places who read [it], never forgot it, and had the freedom to make different choices” (64). There have been numerous film, television, and stage adaptations of the novel, including three major film adaptations in 1933, 1949, and 1994. Each successive film version has reshaped Alcott’s story of female maturation according to changing ideological forces that shape women’s lives, but, at the same time, the text from the past interrogates the presuppositions of the cultures that retell it. Shifting cultural paradigms, especially in the last thirty years, have had the effect of modifying ideologies of masculinity as well as femininity, and changing images of femininity in literature and film are in concert with changing images of masculinity. This observation has particular pertinence to a study of film adaptations of Little Women, a novel in which constructions of masculinity are implicitly questioned in conjunction with Alcott’s explicit concerns with social constraints on femininity and female maturation. As many critics have noted, Jo March, the central character of Alcott’s novel, is shaped in relation to the two primary male characters, Laurie and Frederick Bhaer: Her “masculinity” is counterpointed by their “femininity” (see Keyser and Reardon). As successive film versions of the novel rethink Jo’s gender, her male counterparts are also regendered accordingly. Each film reflects the kinds of choices and freedoms preferred by the culture that produces it and in doing so, gives voice to ideologies that determine dominant images of femininity and masculinity, and female and male maturation. My paper examines the impact of changing ideologies on reshapings of Little Women into film, focusing especially on filmic representations of Jo, Laurie, and Professor Bhaer.