"Little Women" (2019)

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is a thoughtful and often effective adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. Gerwig understands the frustrations of women whose ambitions are constrained by the expectations of their society, and she gives those frustrations considerable force. Yet the film also illustrates a problem that appears in her Barbie: an understandable desire for freedom can become an inadequate account of what freedom is for. We need more than the opportunity to choose our own lives. We need some understanding of what makes a life worth living.

Jo March’s desire to write is not difficult to sympathize with. She has talent, ambition, and something to say. The world around her offers women limited opportunities, and marriage is often treated as their most secure route to a future. When Jo resists the expectation that she should marry, she is resisting a society that too often defines women by their relationships to men. Gerwig is right to take her ambition seriously. But the question is whether freedom from those expectations is enough to explain what Jo should do with her life.

A Christian understanding of vocation offers a different starting point. Vocation does not mean that everyone has been assigned a narrow social role, or that a woman’s gifts must be subordinated to the expectations of her family. It means that our lives have a purpose beyond whatever we happen to desire at a particular moment. We discover and cultivate our gifts, accept responsibilities, and learn to direct our abilities toward worthwhile ends. Our freedom matters, but it is freedom exercised within a reality we did not create.

This is why the relationships among the March sisters matter. Meg, Amy, and Jo have different gifts and ambitions, and they make different choices. Meg’s desire for a home and family is not necessarily a surrender of her individuality. Amy’s recognition that women need financial security is not simply a compromise with an unjust world. Their lives raise questions about how personal ambition, economic reality, love, and responsibility fit together. There is no reason to assume that all three sisters must find fulfillment in the same way. But neither should we assume that a life becomes more authentic simply by resisting conventional expectations.

Gerwig’s treatment of Jo’s relationship with Friedrich Bhaer is therefore revealing. The film plays with the possibility that Jo’s romantic resolution is something she invents to secure the publication of her novel, leaving us uncertain about how much of the ending belongs to Jo’s life and how much belongs to the story she writes. This is a clever response to Alcott’s own complicated relationship with the marriage plot. Yet it also makes romance and artistic independence seem like competing claims. Jo can have her story, but the film appears reluctant to let her have both a fulfilling vocation and a relationship without compromising the independence that defines her.

The problem is not that Jo must marry. It is that the film struggles to imagine relationships as anything other than potential limits on self-determination. Love necessarily makes claims on us. So do family, friendship, and the responsibilities that arise from living alongside other people. These claims can become oppressive, but they can also give shape and meaning to our lives. Freedom does not require that we escape them. It requires that we learn to respond to them rightly.

This is where Little Women connects to Gerwig’s Barbie. In that film, a character created for a purpose must discover a purpose of her own, but the freedom to choose does not supply a convincing answer to what that purpose should be. Jo’s situation is more substantial because she already possesses a gift and a genuine ambition. Even so, the film risks treating her ability to define herself as more important than the question of how she might live well with others.

From a Christian perspective, our purpose is neither an arbitrary role imposed on us nor an invention of our own making. We are created by God, endowed with gifts, and placed in relationships and circumstances that call for wisdom, love, and responsibility. We do not all have the same vocation, and discovering ours may require resisting unjust expectations. But our lives become meaningful through more than the assertion of independence. We flourish when we learn to use our freedom in service of goods that precede our choices.

Jo March deserves the freedom to write. The deeper question is whether that freedom can belong to a life shaped by love and responsibility as well as ambition. Gerwig sees clearly why women need room to discover their gifts. What remains less clear is whether she can imagine that discovery as part of a larger purpose, one in which relationships need not be enemies of individuality and freedom need not mean standing apart from the claims of the world we inhabit.