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Little Women. Prod. by Denise DiNovi. Dir. by Gillian Armstrong. Columbia Pictures, 1994. 1 hr. 55 mins.
In the closing scene of Gillian Armstrong's 1994 film Little Women, we watch the final moments of the courtship of Friedrich Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne) and Jo March (Winona Ryder). Bhaer delivers the proofs of Jo's novel to her Concord, Massachusetts, home and declares to her, "Reading your novel was like opening a window onto your heart." This intertextual moment pays tribute to the enduring love many readers feel for Louisa May Alcott's 1868-1869 novel about the four March sisters, raised by enlightened but poor parents in Civil War New England. In both novel and film, the daughters "conquer themselves beautifully": Writer Jo controls her temper and abandons her misguided passion for sensationalist fiction; beautiful Meg (Trini Alvarado) turns away from her vanity; precocious Amy (Kirsten Dunst and Samantha Mathis) quells her pretentious desires for ladyhood; angelic Beth (Claire Danes) is, simply, conquered, the film's melodramatic sacrifice. In this contemporary rendering, the little women tame their ambitions but do not smother them; they become wives, but they are strong, and their husbands are good.
Bhaer's comment to Jo also articulates the visual device the film uses to bring viewers into what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg calls the "female world of love and ritual" of mid-nineteenth-century New England. (It was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Deerfield, Massachusetts, as well as Concord.) As viewers we peer into the windows of the glowing home of the March women, bathed in warm, golden light; we watch from the outside and sometimes withdraw decorously lest we voyeurs see too much of the emotional intensity of life inside. Never have we seen a visual enactment of sentimentality, domesticity, and the bonds between women as loving, ritualistic, and powerful.
The film is a commercially and thematically successful adaptation of Alcott's tale because it connects two genres, the...