I’d like someone to tell me how it’s been 10 years since I read this book, but as soon as I go back I go back to Jo March.
Now my memory of this novel is from an Illustrated Classics version, read by my elementary-school-age self who loved the ink drawings first and foremost and maybe learned to recognize a few characters after. Everything I knew beforehand is now irretrievably blurred in with Gerwig’s 2019 remake, but I would like to say confidently just how brilliant Jo is in words and in color. I always admired her the most out of the sisters, out of the many (or few, now that I know better) female protagonists I’ve encountered.
I wasn’t open and expressive like she was when I was little, but I had the same ugly stubbornness, the one that made me obsessively driven, and always right, and incredibly sensitive to any and every sign of criticism.
The scene with her and Bhaer — and I don’t think that is a favorite scene of anyone’s — when he tells her simply that her stories are no good, and she promptly loses it. She’s merciless, she doesn’t want anything to do with him again, she has no sense of objectivity or tact. She’s a bit much, isn’t she, saying that he’s being pompous, that he’s an irrelevant critic but“the whole world will remember Jo March”?
Maybe, but that’s the voice I want in my head. Maybe not coming out of my mouth every time a well-meaning critic gives their opinion, but I saw that conviction, that utter belief. I don’t care if she was being childish or unreasonable. That scene cemented her place in my heart.
I’m not going to talk about Jo without talking about Laurie, because for me the way they grew up is important.
When I read this book as I child, I never understood why she and Laurie did not marry. First, I hadn’t read enough to understand that romance could exist in a novel without being at the center. Second, I hadn’t lived enough to know that you could love someone without being in love, or love someone and not marry them, or love someone first and marry someone else.
Greta Gerwig’s time skips are sequenced precisely, and the past looks so lovely when it’s gold-tinted and youthful that I’m starting to see why artists paint it that way. Ronan and Chalamet are flawless. They’re children and then they’re not. You can’t help but see them as two sides of the same coin. After Jo turns Laurie down, and she cries on the hillside even though they’ve known that’s been coming their entire lives, and then she leaves for New York — and you wonder, did she ever love him? When he comes back at Amy’s side and tells her she was right all along — does anyone ever believe someone when they fall in love a second time?
Amy: I believe we have some power over who we love. It isn’t something that just happens to a person.
Laurie: I think the poets might disagree.
Amy: Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman.
I think your first love stays with you, for better or first worse. It doesn’t mean you marry the wrong person or that you have regrets. It doesn’t mean that you missed it, or that you wasted years with someone for nothing. Jo and I both hate to think that life is only about this one thing. Amy, the youngest, sees it clearly. This isn’t the reason the novel was written. The novel is about something else.
Some of the best scenes are the ones at the seaside, the gold and the blue.
There are so many seasides in so many books, but they all seem to mean the same thing. Here, it is where Amy meets Fred Vaughn, whom she does not marry. Where Jo realizes Meg is going to leave. Where Beth tells Jo that she is ready to leave, that she is not scared, that is like the tide that goes out, slowly but surely.
And what else could Jo say but “I’ll stop the tide for you.” She doesn’t have a single accepting bone in her body. She doesn’t accept her own gender, the end of her childhood, and least of all the absence of one of her sisters.
I think it’s very telling that she never writes for herself or Laurie, but as you see her struggle with Beth’s illness, her writing ebbs and flows like the tide. She burns her writing over and over again. She couldn’t even write a novel for herself. Her novel could only ever be for Beth.
Jo is utterly devoted to three things: her writing, her independence, and her family. As much as I connect with her as a child and watching her grow as a writer, I am always struck by her fierce independence. I was always someone a little like that — who didn’t mind being alone for long periods of time with just my work to do. Her monologue about ambition carries — it was meant for an audience of one in an attic in the 1800s, but it is echoing now very promisingly in 2020.
(For all the viewers who are emphasizing that it is a modern adaptation, that the book was never loud about women and their livelihoods the way this Jo and this Amy is — well, what were you expecting?)
Amy: I will be great, or nothing. (I love that it is Amy who gets this stunning line)
But the powerful thing here is that she can be both devoted to independence and her work and also devoted to the people whom she loves. When Laurie tells her “you will find someone, and love them, and you will live and die for them, because that’s your way, and you will,” I don’t think he means it because a woman should get married. I think it’s because Jo will realize that she can have both.
