Jo March and the faultline of fufillment
Anyone who knows me well enough knows that Josephine ‘Jo’ March is my favourite March sister. She always has been. Ever since the first time I picked up Lousia May Alcott’s irrefutably beautiful childhood classic, I have seen a mirror image of myself in Jo March’s fiery temper, wit and inexhaustible love of fiction. I’ve seen myself in her ambition, her defiance and her dreams- and it is through the brilliant lens of director Greta Gerwig that Jo March exists in our hearts and minds as the character Lousia May Alcott always intended her to be.
Greta Gerwig’s powerful addition of the line ‘but I’m so lonely’ in her 2019 adaptation of the novel magnifies the faultline Jo’s heart and mind sit upon; she is tethered to the idealistic longing for company, but refutes the notion that marriage is the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life. Even though Jo March is driven, ambitious and independent, she isn’t invulnerable to the complexity of feeling. She doesn’t fit into a characterised box- nor do any of the March sisters, nor do any of us at all- and Gerwig’s addition of something we’d rather vilify ourselves for rather than come to terms with, reminds us that we coexist with our hearts. We can yearn and long for something that our brain refutes, and that does not make us any less ambitious, independent or driven. In tenfold, it makes us human- something we are so afraid of, because to admit that we are human is to admit that we are innately flawed and dynamic. That we are insecure and egotistical, callous and pathetic, that we are selfish, while we simultaneously fragment ourselves in the name of others. That the rational and irrational sit on two split sides of our minds, and talk to each other in vicious riddles that our brains cannot decipher.
Love exists well beyond the means of romantic affection- though that is not what we are conditioned to accept. Women are spoon-fed the narrative that superlative love consists of marriage and a family- though in truth, love is alive and breathing in corners that collect dust; the parts of our lives that we overlook in an effort to find what others have told us is fulfilling. Jo March’s heart belongs not to Laurie, and by no means to Professor Bhaer either- but to writing. Her immersion in the boundless possibility of the beautiful and imaginary is where she finds her innermost love and stability. We watch Jo’s relationship with writing grow, as it shifts between a means of simultaneous escape, rejection and comfort. It is a relationship so raw and meaningful that it completely undermines her eventual romantic relationship with Professor Bhaer, something made evident through Alcott’s authorial intrusion- wherein we see Jo as a writer above anything else.
As such, Jo’s undying, irrevocable love for her family is the one thing that surpasses her love for writing. Jo routinely sacrifices pieces of herself in the name of the people she loves, such as uprooting the principles of her writing to sell her work to sensationalist newspapers, and cutting off her hair- her “one beauty,” to help finance and support her family. It appears that Friedrich and Jo’s marriage exists purely to subvert and “battle the conventional marriage plot,” (Anne E. Boyd) teaching Alcott’s young audience that love exists in multitudes.
Though Lousia May Alcott was tethered to an unsatisfying compromise with her publishers regarding the marital status of Jo March, Greta Gerwig was not. In fact, Gerwig routinely pays homage to what Alcott wished to see in her own novel. This is inaugurated in the first scene- wherein Jo is met with an unpleasant and abrasive publisher who curtly tells her that novels about unwed women will not sell. This mirrors the instance in which Alcott’s publishers advised her that her novels wouldn’t gain traction if Jo March remained unmarried, as she had initially intended to be. Gerwig’s tribute to Alcott’s original vision for Jo culminates at the end of the film, wherein Jo’s triumph is not marrying Professor Bhaer, but publishing her novel. Gerwig states; “In the end, when she holds her book, I wanted it to feel as triumphant as her being picked by the man. I wanted it to feel like, ‘Oh, she got it. She got the thing.’”
Gerwig’s adaptation helped me come to the understanding that we are not bound by what others think is best for us. That someone else's idea of what fulfilment looks like in their lives, is not necessarily true for another person. We won’t fit into the meticulously personal moulds other people create for themselves, and that is okay.
As Meg March once wisely said, “just because my dreams are different to yours, does not mean they’re unimportant.”
By Emmanuelle Kate
Read my work on my Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-149201004?source=queue