The Production of Louisa May Alcott: Little Women and Subjectivity

Recently, I revisited Greta Gerwig’s Little Women while reading Rebecca Mead’s memoir-by-exegesis My Life in Middlemarch, and was struck by both works’ blurring of the lines between fiction and experiential reality. In the latter work, writer and scholar Rebecca Mead presents an image of connectivity between the Penguin English Library edition of Middlemarch and the Coventry in which she grew up. “The scene”, she describes, of the painting on the book’s cover, “looks exactly like a stretch of countryside that lay within the five minutes’ walk of my parents’ house”. This is not a novel idea. It’s a cliché, really, to exalt a novel, film, or album to the role of life-mirror. But there’s a blurring between subject and object in Mead’s sentence; the mirror-image, or the art representing her actual life in Coventry itself flies from the reflection and becomes the flesh. “The book was reading me, as I was reading it,” she writes.

In an interview with the Writers Guild of America East, Gerwig presents a similar image; “I wanted to create… in some ways, a collapsing of Louisa May Alcott, the author and Jo March, who was her avatar in some ways.” Though I tend to be skeptical of writers’ surreptitious explanations for their production, (you know, Death of the Author and all), Gerwig’s words are clearly not glib appeasements for her interviewer. Truly, Gerwig’s adaptation is not merely Little Women in the sense of a rigid transposition of prose into segments of movement-time; it is, to borrow from Deleuze, a deterritorializing force, plunging the creator and created into smoothness.

If we momentarily snip Louisa May Alcott, (writer of the novel ‘Little Women’ in 1868), out of the picture when reading or watching previous adaptations of Little Women, we encounter - among other narrative delights - what seemingly amounts to a marriage plot: Jo marries Professor Bhaer, and with him opens a school for boys. It’s a conclusion which arguably both makes sense for her character, while also fulfilling the role assigned to women and persistently grafted onto books at the time; marriage as the transcendent imperative that actualizes ‘woman’. But let us watch Little Women in the context of Alcott, as well as Gerwig. 

Alcott, like the protagonist Jo, faced the severance of sisterhood at an early age. When Alcott was twenty-six years old, her younger sister Elizabeth died; and her older sister Anna married, creating a family of her own outside the sisterly space. Like Jo, Alcott wrote pulpy detective stories under a pen name before publishing her seminal novel - she never married. We might then be quick to call Jo March a reflection of Louisa May Alcott, or, to subjectify our protagonist further, a projection of Louisa May Alcott. To be honest, I don’t think this is the interpretation which Mead’s statement; “The book was reading me, as I was reading it”, leads us to either. At what point does Alcott begin to produce Jo March? Or, at what point did Jo March become categorically different from Alcott, to the point of becoming-object?

“If I’m going to sell my heroine into marriage for money, I might as well get something  out of it”, Jo March argues to her publisher Mr. Dashwood, following the purposefully awkward, melodramatic scene in which she literally kisses Bhaer in the rain; an anachronistic reenactment of Kate Winslet’s “I’ll never let go” screed. At this point, the film still allows the viewer a space in which both scenes become consolidated at the story-level: Jo publishes her book and marries Bhaer. Jo’s book is not the film we’ve sat through. However, the film’s visual language suggests an alternative reading. The colors used in the scenes in which Jo argues for and constructs her book are muted, while bright sepia-tones roar inside the scenes presenting the actuality following the “I’ll never let go” moment. These two flows meet at the final scene: a brick red book cover bold against blades of gold that spell out ‘Little Women’, containing multi- and mono-color, thus suggesting equal substance of the two sequences from which it proceeds. We see Jo pick up her book, and look through a window out into the world. In doing so, Jo in a sense produces Little Women, has become Louisa May Alcott. Subject and object, producer and produced, plunged into multiplicity.

In A Thousand Plateaus, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari present a similar mode in which to consider ‘books’; “A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute a book to a subject is to overlook the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God…” Gerwig’s Little Women, rather than making Alcott into a beneficent God, smooths the striations between Alcott and Jo to the point that fiction and author do not lose their singularity but also become one machine. In the same interview, Gerwig states; “It’s hard to say now if I was like Jo and that’s why I connected with her or if I liked Jo and then I made myself like Jo.” Gerwig and Jo, like Alcott and Jo, could be collapsed onto a singular plane of smoothness, in which both can become subject and object distinctly and simultaneously.

To what degree does Little Women produce Greta Gerwig? I’m still trying to articulate an answer to that question. But does Little Women produce a certain Greta Gerwig-ness that generates in my mind a distinct and unmistakably Greta Gerwig image? I would argue that it does. And that is what I love so much about Little Women - it is a movie that argues for movies not just as empathy-instruments, but also as reality-shaping tools in themselves. The movies we consume produce us as much as we produce them. As Mead stipulates; “The book was reading me, as I was reading it.” So let’s create the films that generate the world we want to live in.