Little Women is now 20 years old!
Little Women (1994) is a holiday classic.
Let’s be honest, holiday films are a genre usually forgotten eleven months out of the year. It’s in that twelfth month that their tradition arises and they’re reintroduced into our homes like visiting families. Films like Christmas Vacation (1989), A Christmas Story (1983), and Elf (2003) have recently become staples. Each December, they fill our homes with joy and laughter.
You also have the imaginative classics, the films that take you back to holidays past and transport you to the excitement and hope of believing: The Santa Clause (1994); both versions of Miracle on 34th Street (1947; 1994); and animated classics like Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964).
Holiday films are about family, friendship, growing up, and going home. This is what Little Women does – it takes you home. It takes you back to your family and memories, and it helps you to remember what’s important. Around the holidays, that’s not a bad thing to be reminded of.
You might've grown up with Louisa May Alcott’s story in some artistic form. You may have met Jo March as Katharine Hepburn, Winona Ryder, or as the product of your own imagination.
Little Women is about many things: love, loss, sisterhood, and growing up. As in all great films, there’s something about the March girls that reflect themselves onto the viewer. There is a Marmee, a Meg, a Beth, an Amy, and a Jo that lives in viewers.
Gillian Armstrong’s rendition of the story is brave; of course, all filmmakers remaking a Hollywood classic are never doubted on their bravery, especially one starring the late and great Katharine Hepburn.
As in Alcott’s novel, what shines most brightly in Armstrong’s film are the characters, or, perhaps more so, the young cast's ability to take the historic characters and bring them to life and make them matter in the cynical 1990s. The talented ensemble is filled with names then not near their prime, like Christian Bale, Kirsten Dunst, and Claire Danes. Their youthfully spirited performances foreshadow the magnificent careers lying ahead for them in Hollywood future.In addition, the film has talent then already in their prime –Susan Sarandon, Gabriel Byrne, Eric Stoltz, and Winona Ryder at their best. Looking at each of their filmographies, you can see this time period – the mid-1990s – as when they really shined.
Of course, Winona Ryder (who was nominated for her performance as Jo March) deserves more than a sentence mention in an article about Armstrong’s Little Women. Ryder is the reason to watch this film. In my mind, always, Winona Ryder is Jo March. Ryder’s raw talent and beautiful ability to transport and portray the essence of youthful innocence and the transcendence into adulthood is what makes her one of the best actresses of the 1990s.
But Little Women is about more than just characters and great performances; as the title suggests, it’s about women. It’s about social hierarchy, societal expectations, and rebellion against the norm. It’s a film about a family of girls being raised on early feminist values during The Civil War.
Little Women reminds you of the unfairness and challenges women have faced and continue to face. It reminds you not to take blessings for granted, but to always keep fighting and progressing to become our best, not just as women, but as human beings.
It’s no coincidence that Little Women, like the majority of Jane Austen novels, found its way onto the screen in the mid-1990s. These literary classics, written by strong women, about strong heroines, were riding along the third-wave of feminism. Little Women encourages the push of gender-biased boundaries. Marmee (Susan Sarandon), for instance, runs the household, as most women do during the war. The March girls are taught the benefits of being educated and scowl at the criticisms of educating women. Jo March refuses a good marriage in exchange for the opportunity to find herself and become an established writer.
It's through Jo that we’re able to distinguish the difficulties and challenges of being a woman. Jo March, like many female writers of the time, had to publish under a male pseudonym in order to be taken seriously. When Laurie (Christian Bale) goes off to college, Jo proclaims her own yearning for a college level education and the impossibility of receiving one. As Jo says, “I’d murder to go to college.”
Jo March was a fighter for gender equality. She was a feminist before the word had universal meaning. Jo and her family pushed the boundaries of progression, making an early wave. It’s the progression of gender politics and the inner progression of oneself.
So, every winter as the temperatures drop and the snow begins to fall, when the holiday lights go up, and evergreens illuminate through the windows. As children and adults of all ages zoom gleefully in circles on the ice rinks and crowds of shoppers flood the stores vying to purchase the latest gadgets, every time a Christmas carol escapes the keys of a wooden piano, I remember what Little Women meant to me as a child, as a young adult, as an adult, as a sister, as a daughter, and now, as a writer. It takes me back to a special time and place. It takes me back to my youth and imagination. Like a good holiday classic, Little Women is a tradition, and every year that tradition takes me home.
by Ashley Stewart Falls
