Heroines

Yesterday I saw the Greta Gerwig film, Little Women. It was wonderful. And it reminded me of all the 19th. century novels I read growing up with strong, rebellious heroines with whom I completely identified. Reading Little Women almost one hundred years after it was written, I was Jo, struggling to find a voice and determined to make it in what was still a man’s world.

When Pride and Prejudice was adapted for TV in 1980 I read a review by a woman who said that it had been miscast because she knew that Elizabeth Bennett looked exactly like her. Not true, I thought, she was me! And I felt the same way about Jane in Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. These were flawed heroines, but what they had in common was some degree of failure to fit into an ideal of femininity and a sense of injustice.  

I used to have a poster with this quote from Jane Eyre:

I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

This could easily have been said by Jo, but she is also realistic about the loneliness that results and is even prepared to accept a proposal to overcome her despair. Amy was the sister I never appreciated until Gerwig made it clear that she too had aspirations, but was clear headed about the need to marry a rich man in order to survive and support her family.

The March women were constrained by gender and poverty, but much of the discrimination they faced does not feel out-of-date. As Gayle Tzemach Lemmon points out in a piece for NBC News, this is clearly illustrated by the fact that their story is not considered universal the way stories about men are, and men are reluctant to see the film. The men I spoke to as I was leaving the theater all said they were surprised that they liked the film. They had gone only to accompany a woman. I didn’t have time for extended conversation but wonder if what they loved were the production values and if they could relate at all to the reality of the sisters’ lives that I felt so viscerally.