I’m Always Home. I’m Uncool.

I’d just like to go on record in saying that my last post was in no way meant to be a stab at anyone’s masculinity. I just needed a snazzy title. I can fully understand that there are some people don’t like Little Women, just like I can understand that there are men who do like it and women who don’t.

Also, the comment left on my pervious blog has got me thinking, and now I wish to change my question a bit: why is it that the title of Little Women gives a person (male or female) a natural wish to avoid it? When I first saw the title I thought it was hilariously funny… but then again, when you’re nine and stuck inside for hours on end while it’s raining, everything can seem hilariously funny…

Just before the break, I got my boyfriend to watch the 1994 Little Women with me. Little Women is my favorite book. My boyfriend hates Little Women. He has never read it, but only hears me talk about it. You’d think after such a glowing recommendation, he would be chopping at the bit to read this great American novel. Not true. It was only after much coercing that he agreed to even watch the movie with me. While watching the movie he kept saying things like “she likes him, doesn’t she” (referring to Jo and Laurie). I told him that he’d have to wait and see, but he was impatient and made me tell him anyway. Afterward he became very upset and kept insisting “but she looks so smitten!”  “If I were her, I’d be smitten.” He also couldn’t tell any of the girls apart, which was amazing to me as they all look and act very, very different. After the movie ended he complained for five minutes about how Jo and Laurie should have ended up together, and how he hated the Professor. I then said, “You should read the book, then maybe you’d understand more.” He responded: “no way, you know how much I hate that book.”

You cannot care that much about Jo and Laurie and “hate” Little Women.

This got me to thinking about all our talk about gender and our conversation way way back when about the male equivalent of Little Women. Why is it that men have a natural aversion to Little Women. And what does this say about the men that are actually in the book, themselves?

There aren’t words to describe how I feel about this movie. All I can think to say is that it’s so horrific, that it’s absolutely brilliant.

I don’t know who cast this film, but all I can say is: good job. Elizabeth Taylor looks at least five years older than the girl who plays Beth. Beth, who ought to be thirteen, looks around the age of an eleven year old. And Amy, who ought to be twelve, well… just isn’t twelve. Not to mention that “Amy” was taller than all of her classmates, and looked a great deal older than all of them. Oh, just thinking about Amy at the school house makes me want to watch it all over again.

Now, I’m really hoping that this movie has some redeeming qualities, but I’m not holding my breath. So far, this film has to be the worst adaptation of Little Women in the history of forever. It appears as if the good, Christian morals of the Marches have flown out the window. The girls ran out to buy things and forgot about the letter from their father. Okay, wait, let me just say that again, so that it really sinks in: They ran out to buy themselves things, and forgot about the letter from their father who is off fighting a WAR. And the Christmas breakfast? A VOTE? A VOTE about whether or not to do the good thing, or let the Hummels starve to death? Wow. I have a feeling that Mervyn LeRoy’s only knowledge of Little Women was what he saw in Cukor’s version, and what might have been described to him, in rough detail, about the novel itself. Although, I have to admit, watching Amy feed the Hummel children was probably one of the greatest things I’ve seen in a good long while.  I will say this, in defense of the movie: the setting (although at times looking exactly like the Cukor version – i.e. the Laurence’s house) is fantastic. Everything looks like it came directly out of a picture book. Very calculated, almost theatrical. I loved it. So it didn’t have that authentic 1860s vibe, but it sure did look pretty. I just want to spend the rest of my life watching this horrific version of my favorite book. It’s like a train wreck. I just can’t look away or I’m sure I’ll miss a severed limb.

We didn’t get to talk about Amy today in class, so I thought I’d blog about her.

I think that Amy is one of the most interesting characters in Little Women. She is the character that everyone loves to hate (and on a very rare occasion, although I don’t understand it, love to love). I think that I am not alone in saying that I had a strong desire to toss Amy herself into the fire after she burned Jo’s manuscript.

I think that Amy is an absolutely fantastic character, because she is the one that is most true to life. I know that she has reminded me more than once of my own little sister. She’s that spoiled cousin, or baby sister, or playmate we all had at one point in our lives. I also think it’s interesting that I never seem to feel pity for her. I felt sorry for Jo when Amy burned her manuscript, but I didn’t feel at all sorry for Amy when Jo told her she couldn’t go with them to the theater. I never once felt bad that Mr. Davis hit her, or that he made her toss all her limes out the window, and I always hated how she complained about going to Aunt March’s when Beth was sick. I quite literally wanted to shake her myself.

But the MOST interesting thing about Amy, at least to me, is her lack of involvement with her family. Every other character seems to interact/care more about the Marches than Amy does. As a child, all Amy cares about is her art and herself. She hardly shows any affection towards her sisters, and acts above Beth (who is nothing but good to her) although Beth is older than she is. Amy always tries to be above her family in one way or another. The best example I can think of is her dinner party for all the girls in her art class. She had to get all the expensive, delicate food that she thought they would be used to rather than realizing that it would be best to be plain. And, here’s the kicker, Amy wasn’t even there when Beth died. She was in Europe.

Stubborn. Proud. Childish. Stupid. Arrogant. Self-serving. In a word: Amy.

I am not ashamed to say that I am one of those people Dr. Campbell was talking about who border on obsession with the book Little Women.

I have read Little Women ten times since first picking it up in fifth grade. The first copy I read (I do have another copy, simply because the first one is old, and precious) was a cloth-bound deal that my Great-Grandmother stole from the Concord (ironically where the March family is said to live in the 1994 version of the film) Library in New Hampshire sometime in the early 1950s.

I feel an overwhelmingly strong connection with this book. Each word is comforting and familiar to me. And I can identify with the March family all too easily, seeing as they are a model of my own. I have a twin sister who embodies both Meg and Beth at the same time, right down to Meg’s vanity of her hands (my sister is strangely obsessed with her own hands, and quite vain of them, something I have never understood about her or Meg) nad Beth’s fear of unknown people (another thing I have never quite understood about my sister). My little sister is Amy in nearly every sense of the word, the only exception being that she has red hair, not blonde. And I, as many people who have read the book before me, am most closely tied to Jo, probably because I was a tomboy as a kid, and the fact that I am currently a scribbler. It was actually Little Woman that made me realize my dream to become a writer.

At the risk of sounding absolutely insane, I am going to put myself out there and say that I am attached to this book like I am to nothing else in the world. And I’m not sure what it is. I think the writing is wonderful, the characters are absolutely perfect and believable (they are the sort of people you can get to know and root for), the lessons hidden (and more often than not, blatantly in-your-face) within the book I believe to be important, and Alcott’s commentary within the book can be absolutely hilarious. Yet, I still don’t know what it is about this books that drew me in at the tender age of nine.

The one thing that baffles me most about my love for Little Women is the fact that it is completely not my scene. I am not a religious person. As a matter of fact, I am an atheist. But the constant Christian morals and biblical references do not bother me in the least. I hate female main characters, and never write stories that have them. My favorite author is Stephen King. And I think that a movie is made infinitely better with an explosion or two.

So why am I so utterly, completely, and totally hooked to this book? The world may never know.