A Paper on Adaptation: Little Women

 
 

Humans are constantly adapting to the changing world around us, so it only makes sense that we would adapt literature to view in new and different media, including cinema. In his 1984 essay, Concepts in Film Theory, Dudley Andrew discusses the use of adaptation in cinema. He pinpoints the primary modes of adaptation: borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation. In this paper, I want to discuss these different modes of adaptation in regard to Greta Gerwig’s unique 2019 adaptation of Little Women

Little Women has been adapted from Louisa May Alcott’s original text several times over; Gerwig’s adaptation is the sixth rendition as a feature film. The biggest difference in Gerwig’s adaptation to the prior films is that it does not follow a single, linear timeline. Alcott’s original text featured two parts, the first of which is set during the American Civil War and the second three years after the war’s end, and follows the March sisters on their journeys to adulthood. While other film adaptations chose to follow this linear timeline, Gerwig chose to weave the two timelines together, drawing parallels between them. 

This choice of storytelling could be argued to be using the ‘borrowing’ mode of adaptation which Andrew (1984) described as, “the artist employ[ing], more or less extensively, the material, idea or form of an earlier, generally successful text” (p. 332). To my knowledge, this is the first adaptation of Little Women to not start at Christmas time during the Civil War. Every Little Women fan expects to hear, “Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,” to open the movie, and when this does not happen, you begin to wonder if Gerwig is just ‘borrowing’ ideas from the source material. 

However, I have concluded that what Gerwig did with her adaptation is a successful blending of ‘intersection’ and ‘fidelity of transformation’ modes. Andrew suggests that adaptations that use ‘intersection’ leave the original text virtually “unassimilated in adaptation” and are scared to truly adapt. Although Gerwig’s Little Women was not afraid to adapt (recall its parallel timelines), it also left much of Alcott’s original text unaltered in the final screenplay and film. The scene in which Jo refuses Laurie’s marriage proposal is iconic to the story, and Gerwig’s take on it left the dialogue nearly unaltered from the book. One of my favorite examples from the scene is this sequence of dialogue, which in the book reads as follows:

“You'll get over this after a while and find some lovely accomplished girl, who will adore you, and make a fine mistress for your fine house. I shouldn't. I'm homely and awkward and odd and old, and you'd be ashamed of me, and we should quarrel––we can't help it even now, you see––and I shouldn't like elegant society and you would, and you'd hate my scribbling, and I couldn't get on without it, and we should be unhappy, and wish we hadn't done it, and everything would be horrid!”

“Anything more?” asked Laurie, finding it hard to listen patiently to this prophetic burst.

“Nothing more, except that I don't believe I shall ever marry. I'm happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man.”

This passage is repeated almost verbatim in Gerwig’s adaptation. In the screenplay it reads as follows:

JO

You'll find some lovely accomplished girl, who will love you and adore you, and make a fine mistress for your fine house. I wouldn't. I'm homely and awkward and odd and you'd be ashamed of me, and we would quarrel––we can't help it even now!––I’d hate elegant society and you'd hate my scribbling, and we would be unhappy, and wish we hadn't done it, and everything would be horrid!

LAURIE
Anything more?

JO

Nothing more --- except that...I don't believe I shall ever marry. I'm happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up.


By choosing to use Alcotts’ dialogue almost verbatim, Gerwig made something written almost 200 years ago incredibly relatable. This also helps us to see how ahead of her time Alcott was when she wrote Little Women since many of these lines still resonate with audiences today. This in turn helps to keep the fidelity to the spirit of the original text alive. Andrew (1984) states, “More difficult is fidelity to the spirit, to the original’s tone, values, imagery, and rhythm” (p. 334). While the spirit of an original text can be interpreted differently by each person, Gerwig’s adaptation seemed to strike a chord with many. I concur that the spirit and values that Gerwig chose to highlight are the relationships between women and how they change as they grow up and follow different paths. In Alcott’s original text, Jo is adamant about why a marriage between Laurie and herself wouldn’t work. Gerwig could have rewritten this scene to made it feel more modern, or tried to make Jo seem like more of a feminist, but instead Saoirse Ronan as Jo hurls these words at Laurie with such passion that you can’t image it not being the original text. Thanks to this, readers who loved the book get to truly watch this scene come to life before them.

In Gerwig’s adaptation she does much more than just tell the story again, as five films did before her. Her genius in being able to use both ‘intersection’ and ‘fidelity of transformation’ to adapt this novel creates a truly unique cinematic experience. She weaves the two timelines of the two-part novel together, creating new connections and parallels that audiences and readers alike may not have put together previously, all while holding onto Alcott’s original text and keeping her spirit in the film.  





References

Andrew, D., Braudy, L., & Cohen, M. (2016). Concepts in Film Theory. In Film Theory and Criticism (8th ed., pp. 330-334). New York, NY: Oxford.