This weekend director Greta Gerwig\u2019s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott\u2019s \u201cLittle Women\u201d is up for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It is the seventh feature film to be made from Alcott\u2019s book and perhaps the most distinctive. Unfortunately, the latest film leaves out an important theme from the original text: faith.<\/p>\n
The previous six movies hewed more or less to Alcott\u2019s strictly chronological narrative structure, which follows the four March sisters\u2014Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy\u2014from their teen years to their late 20s. Ms. Gerwig\u2019s film instead offers a deconstructed version. The events in Alcott\u2019s book are presented as flashbacks in a deliberately scrambled order that reflects not chronology but the thematic aims of Ms. Gerwig, who also wrote the screenplay.<\/p>\n
By violating Alcott\u2019s narrative structure Ms. Gerwig also undermines the writer\u2019s framing of the story as a tale of moral growth in a world at odds with living a Christian life. In particular, Alcott tied her story through explicit references to \u201cThe Pilgrim\u2019s Progress,\u201d John Bunyan\u2019s entertaining and hugely successful 17th-century allegory of the journey of a man named Christian\u2014and later, his wife and sons\u2014through the travails of this world to the Celestial City. Bearing the burdens of their sins, they encounter such colorful characters as Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Giant Despair, and pass through such traps for the soul as Vanity Fair, the Slough of Despond, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Well into the 20th century \u201cPilgrim\u2019s Progress\u201d was, after the Bible, the most-read book in many Anglophone Protestant households.<\/p>\n
In Alcott\u2019s \u201cLittle Women\u201d each of the March girls has besetting sins that she must overcome through constant striving.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Greta Gerwig\u2019s \u201cLittle Women\u201d leaves out an important theme from the original text: faith, writes Charlotte Allen https:\/\/t.co\/7V8USd5kCl<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Adam O’Neal (@AdamWSJ) February 7, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n