Big women on Little Women
FASHIONS come and go. Little Women stays the same. Published in the United States in 1868, Louisa May Alcott's coming-of-age tale about the four March sisters - steadfast Meg, sharp-tongued Jo, angelic Beth and vain Amy - was a rite of passage for generations of young women and girls. CAMILLE PAGLIA, author of Sexual Personae, Sex, Art and American Culture and Vamps and Tramps : Little Women felt real to me because that's how I felt in the 50s. I felt there was a very conventional feminine sexual system that was being imposed. The remoteness of the Victorian era in the novel felt exactly like the 50s did to a little girl like me, who didn't identify with her gender.
Little Women for me has an entombing feeling. It's a wonderful depiction of the social cage women were in for so many centuries. So it's frightening to me, because the Jo character I identify with feels marooned.
SUSAN SARANDON, American actress who plays Mrs March in the latest film version: This was a story that meant a lot to me as a kid. Even though I didn't read the book, I saw the Katharine Hepburn version on television. What drew me to the current project more than anything were the people working on it. Colleen Atwood, who did the wardrobe, assured me it wasn't going to be Hollywood, it was going to be girls' hand-me-down dresses with dirty hems. No one's wearing make-up. It's all very brutal in its look - and quite startling.
This Marmee is a lot closer to Louisa May Alcott's mother, on whom Marmee was based. Marmee was not a traditional woman. She married out of her class and worked outside the home. And she had to make do with very little money, which I think is the point of the story - a family under stress is bound together by love and a sense of interdependency with the world.
I assume I'll read the book now with my daughter. You have different kinds of women trying to experiment with what power means and what they want in their lives. It's also very romantic, with the question about what happens when the boy everyone wants you to love, loves you but you don't love him.
CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTES, American author of Women Who Run With the Wolves : As a young poet growing up in the immigrant underclass, there were few role models for those with literary aspirations. Even though Jo March came from an entirely different class of children than we did, her literary ambitions were eye-opening.