Much of Jo’s charm and appeal lie in the idea that, unlike Buffy Summers, she is not a superhero (although Beth’s goodness certainly appears superpowered). As Alcott writes toward the end of the novel, “Jo wasn’t a heroine, she was only a struggling human girl like hundreds of others, and she just acted out her nature…. She had often said she wanted to do something splendid, no matter how hard; and now she had her wish, for what could be more beautiful than to devote her life to Father and Mother, trying to make home as happy to them as they had to her? And if difficulties were necessary to increase the splendor of the effort, what could be harder for a restless, ambitious girl than to give up her own hopes, plans, and desires, and cheerfully live for others?” (p. 420). We note, of course, that Alcott made such sacrifices in her own life, and her point, although it may be hard to swallow, is that heroics come in both big and small proportions.
Overall, then, how relevant can Little Women be to twenty-first-century youth? As Americans, for better or worse, remove themselves further from lifestyles like those of Alcott’s close-knit community of charitable neighbors, is Little Women to be relegated to solely period-piece status – fine fodder for costume-drama films and small children’s bedtime stories but not much else? Particularly following feminist critiques of Alcott’s domestic novel, readers have been more vocal about finding it sentimental, even sometimes cloyingly sweet, by more modern standards. Yet it is a testament to Alcott’s descriptive powers that though the family’s shared activities may seem strange to a twenty-first-century audience, their utter sweetness and quaintness are in their own way rather stunning and just might provoke wistful feelings for a simpler kind of family life among even cynical readers – paradoxically just as the family’s episodes of cloying togetherness may sometimes raise their gorge. We may wonder at how Beth, for example, could be so unnaturally shy as to dread being the center of attention at her own birthday parties – where members of her loving, indulgent family are the only guests! No matter how unrealistic or saccharine-sweet we may find Beth’s goodness, many readers find it difficult to avoid tears at her fate.
Other sequels in the March family saga followed Little Women and continued its popular tradition. The first, Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys (1871), describes events at the school Jo founds and the adventures of her diverse crew of pupils – all little boys, with the exception of Jo’s nieces and the extremely naughty girl Nan, an even more tomboyish specimen than Jo herself had been as a child. The last book in the trilogy, Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out (1886), would be Alcott’s final novel, published only two years before the author’s death. Written slowly, while Alcott was in poor health, the book centers on romance plots between the younger characters introduced in Little Men.
Several film adaptations of Little Women have appeared over the years, with appeals to successive generations of readers. Katharine Hepburn brought Jo so vividly to life in director George Cukor’s classic 1933 movie version (released only six years after the poll that found the novel more popular than the Bible) that Hepburn’s particular brand of sharp New England eccentricity has been forever linked to that character. Her portrayal has colored critics’ judgments of other screen depictions of Jo – such as June Allyson’s in the blander 1949 color version – and has set these later actors up for unwinnable comparisons. A more feminist film version of Little Women, from 1994, casts activist actor Susan Sarandon as Marmee, a very clear, pointed choice, and Winona Ryder, whose other roles many teen girl rebels have identified with, as a Jo March for the 1990s. This version also updates Professor Bhaer, doing the rumpled nineteenth-century scholar a tremendous favor by metamorphosing him into darkly handsome actor Gabriel Byrne.
