The Impact of Little Women

I was applying to a summer program, and an essay prompt asked me to talk about a book or a movie and what it meant to me. Needless to say (if you’ve read the title), I picked Little Women, the 2019 film version by Greta Gerwig. And before I knew it, the essay that was intended to be 500 words ended up being 1025 words. Of course, I had to significantly cut down on what I was saying, but 500 words are not nearly enough to fully articulate what this piece means to me. I ended up saving the 1025-words version (even though I didn’t submit it, obviously), and I thought, what better way to start off the new year than with a celebration of some of the strong women who’ve gotten us to this point? I’m sharing this essay with you so that together, we can appreciate the cathartic, powerful, nostalgic work of art that is Little Women. Hope you enjoy it!

Akshara and I huddled beneath the dining table, clutching onto each other for dear life, sweating profusely through our clothes from sheer panic. In our tiny hands were the contraband, the incriminating evidence. With a heavy conscience, I turned to look at Akshara, and as if it were the very last act in my hapless existence, I dramatically handed her my stolen chocolate. 

“Take it,” I said, voice quivering, “it’s yours now.”

I, being the melodramatic child that I was, expected her to hand me her stolen chocolate with just as much dramatism, hoping that this moment would forever commemorate our sisterhood. But of course, like any sane five-year-old, Akshara devoured both her and my chocolates without a shred of remorse. 

I gasped in horror: my cousin, my partner in crime, my trusted companion had just double-crossed me. It was at that moment that my six-year-old self vowed never to speak with her again, which, of course, lasted for a whole five seconds, just until we found more chocolates to steal, more memories to make.

Years of impossible undertakings and chocolate robberies later, I found myself in the basement of my house laughing and crying alongside four on-screen characters like I was a fly on a wall in the March household. Since it was a consistent member in my ever-so-large “movies-to-watch” list, I finally decided to try Greta Gerwig’s take on Little Women, a classic novel that I had grown up loving. Watching the four untamable, bold women who religiously refused to be anything but themselves made me wonder about the ever-so-melodramatic little girl who got inordinately emotional over a lost piece of chocolate.

Where had she gone? And why had it taken me so long to realize that she wasn’t here?

Ten years of my life had passed me by, and in my preoccupation with assimilating completely into a culture that wasn’t my own, I hadn’t realized just how much I’d gotten used to feeling like an imposter, even in my own body. I became a shapeshifter that consistently changed form to satiate society’s never-ending hunger to tame originality into conventionality, so much so that, at one point, I was unable to recognize myself, to see the remnants of the girl I was. In my quest to become likable and accepted by those around me, I buried the idiosyncratic, emotional, caring person that I was. I thought it was inevitable, an unfortunate loss that made me more American, more tame, fit to enter the glorious next stage of womanhood. 

But Gerwig reminded me of how much I adored wild spirits, like that of Jo March, a widely-celebrated mirror-image of Louisa May Alcott herself. Alcott and March, two icons in both history and fiction, strutted with their heads held high, never once shying away from their complexity. Through Jo, Alcott embraced all of herself, including her scars, flaws, non-conformist tendencies, and openly penned them for the whole world to criticize. This inevitably resulted in the radical idea that women could proudly exist as complex creatures, with ideas and ambition, and not just as fine ladies, a timeless sentiment that resonated with countless women back in 1868. Flash forward a century and a half, Gerwig’s version of this beloved story was really a love letter to all that Alcott’s legacy continues to be.

Instead of chronologically dividing the work into two parts as Alcott did, Gerwig wove together the two separate timelines that were seven years apart, shifting back and forth between them. The result was a heartbreaking analysis of what used to be, what is, and what changed. I ached for the empty house that once bore the presence of four loud sisters, and for May, who had unattained dreams of living a rich lifestyle, and for Jo, who once rebelliously refused marriage, but then poignantly realized the depth of her loneliness. Although visibly a realist at heart, Gerwig’s innovative approach was neither glass-half-empty nor glass-half-full. Instead, she showed her audience that her glass was filled to the rim: half with the foundation of pre-existing water and half with the potential for more; half with the base of Alcott’s profoundly multidimensional, heart-wrenchingly human characters, and half with Gerwig’s own flair on Alcott’s work generations later. 

Half with the triumph of how far we’ve come, and half with anticipation of how far we can go. And there’s no limit: as generations of women contribute their halves, the glass keeps expanding, just like our ambition, our potential, our unmistakable humanity.

In one scene in the movie, Jo is seen laying down the pages in her manuscript and shifting the order in which they were. This bore an undeniable resemblance to Gerwig’s choice of fusing the timelines, showing that Gerwig also saw herself in Jo just like Alcott did, that Gerwig also could immortalize her legacy through Jo’s spirit just like Alcott did, that Gerwig also once laughed and cried alongside the little women, just like I did. 

I left my dark basement that night, with a subliminal connection to a wide community of complex women I had never met, each with a disposition that resembled an intricate mosaic. Through the novel that had been adapted numerous times, countless women saw bits and pieces of their own character in the little women. Countless women, through this work of art, decided to abandon the unsatisfying terms of conventionality and instead chose to be the powerful forces of nature that they were. 

And somehow, even though I was still so petrified of being misunderstood, somewhere within me, I found the courage to do the same. Somewhere, I found a way to fight the temptation of being an actor in my own life, I found a desire for authenticity and for real community, the kind that would take me for better or worse, I found a yearning to be loved deeply and not just accepted widely, I found an urgency to find the little girl that disappeared. 

And when I looked hard enough, the little girl wasn’t lost at all.

She was right there, with the same inevitable power vested in her by stolen chocolates,

waiting patiently to become a little woman.