Greta Gerwig’s metatextual adaptation of “Little Women”

lead_720_405
The Atlantic contributor John Matteson writes that Little Women asks its audience how someone can act selflessly without destroying themselves. (Image Courtesy: The Atlantic).

The final scenes of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) have been a source of contention among purists for their reinterpretation of the ending to the 1860s novel of the same name by Louisa May Alcott, but it makes a postmodern statement about love, according to The Atlantic. Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) suggests the protagonist of her manuscript, Little Women, marry Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), when her surviving sisters, Meg (Emma Watson) and Amy (Florence Pugh), offer much of the film’s love as they encourage her to go after the professor. Alcott, who died a childless, unmarried virgin, still sacrificed out of love to an altruistic amount for her own family, caretaking for her aging parents, providing for her widowed older sister’s sons, as well as raising her youngest sister’s baby after she died in childbirth.

Author: Hunter Goddard, MA, BA

I am an award-winning journalist, memoirist, and personal essayist in Denver, Colorado. I hold a Master of Arts in Professional Creative Writing with a concentration in Nonfiction from the University of Denver, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Media Communication from Colorado State University Fort Collins, with a concentration in Publications Writing, Editing, and Production, and an interdisciplinary minor in Film Studies. I am passionate about inspiring positive change and meaningful action through the power of the literary arts.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: