Something missing from Little Women
Little Women was one of last year’s most acclaimed films. But, wrote Charlotte Allen in the Wall Street Journal, the film misses one of the key themes of Louisa May Alcott’s original novel: namely, religion. The novel was a spiritual journey in which each of the March sisters struggles with their besetting sins. Indeed, the book would have been a dreary piece of sermonising without Alcott’s storytelling gifts. The film includes Mrs “Marmee” March’s admission that she is “angry nearly every day of my life”, but omits her advice to her daughter to entrust herself and her faults to “the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father”. The mother also gives her daughters copies of the Gospels. The film “has many virtues”, Allen concluded. “But it is not the Little Women that Louisa May Alcott wrote: a tale of delightful, fun-loving young girls who learn through folly, disappointment, sorrow and moral reckoning that their lives are actually pilgrimages to the Celestial City.”
