A relic from April 2020.

If Florence Pugh wins the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, it’ll be for the speech she makes to Timothée Chalamet, defending women’s right to be pragmatic in their choice of a life partner: 

Well. I’m not a poet, I’m just a woman. And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money, not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we gotmarried. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

If, on the other hand, Saoirse Ronan wins the Oscar for Best Actress, it’ll be for the speech she makes to Laura Dern, proclaiming women’s right to be more than their choice of a life partner: 

I just – I just feel – I just feel like…women, they – they have minds and they have souls, as well as just hearts, and they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent as well as just beauty, and I’m so sick of people saying that – that love is just all a woman is fit for, I’m so sick of it. 

I’ve meditated on these two scenes for the past few weeks, contemplating them as earlier generations of women might have contemplated a diptych of the two Marys. The sisters are certainly counterpoised to each other in much the same way; we’re encouraged to identify with either one or the other. Are you a Jo, running corsetless through the streets of New York, defying the norms of femininity with each pointed stroke of your inky pen? Or are you an Amy, redeemed by Pugh’s delightfully revisionist performance for the millions of women who enjoy being feminine and refuse to be shamed for doing so? 

I will lay my cards on the table and confess myself a Jo – with the caveat that this comes not by instinct, but by experience. I first read the book sometime in elementary school and found myself drawn to Meg and Amy far more than Jo and Beth. With no sisters and a tomboy chemist mother who preferred Jack Aubrey to Jane Austen, Meg’s experience of having older, more sophisticated girls squeeze her into a beautiful dress and teach her how to charm older, more sophisticated men sounded like a dream, as did Amy’s adventures in the palaces, museums, and gardens of the Continent. Dashing suitors, dance cards, Daisy and Demi, Meg’s darling twins – what were boring St. Beth and poky old Professor Bhaer to these delights? 

Subsequent years and subsequent re-readings, however, have revealed to me that I am far more of a Jo than I thought. In a recent interview, Gerwig spoke of a dawning realization in her teenage years that boys weren’t very impressed by the fact that she knew all the words to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” or Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.” My experience was much the same. As it turned out, boys didn’t want to fill up my dance card and whirl me across the gym at high school dances, nor did they want to hear me recite “Annabel Lee” from memory. What they wanted to do was grind up against me to loud, incoherent music and whisper dirty jokes in my ear. 

This I found objectionable, both out of both principle and out of discomfort with my womanly body and burgeoning sexuality. A 21^st-century Amy might have acceded to these awkward adolescent advances, but that was not me. And while a 19^th-century Amy would never had been caught dead wearing any kind of makeup, her 21^st-century counterpart would never be caught dead without it. I found that makeup made me feel more insecure, not less – wouldn’t my real face be a disappointment?– and I stopped wearing it within three months of starting high school, retreating further and further into the world of books and writing and study. Many years later, I find myself a graduate student in literature, a pen for hire, and more likely to get in a drunk shouting match on why The Winter’s Tale is better than The Tempest or why Lord of the Rings is better than Star Wars with whomever will listen at a bar than I am to be racking up names and numbers on my dance card – or, rather, iPhone. 

But the reason I keep coming back to these two scenes in my head is because of the ways they’ve been repackaged for the trailers and press junkets. Moments before Amy confronts Laurie’s privileged assumptions about marriage, their conversation meanders to the question of female genius – an important exchange that marketers have overlooked in their quest for the perfect soundbite. Amy admits to Laurie that she has “talent” but not “genius” as a painter. Laurie pushes her on the distinction. “What women are allowed into the club of geniuses anyway?” he asks. “The Brontës,” Amy responds. Surprised at the short list, he concludes that the male gatekeepers to the genius club are “cutting down the competition.” 

In the thick of Oscars season, this dialogue feels on-the-nose – and, more than that, it’s just deeply odd. Gerwig has done a marvelous job of rediscovering some of Amy’s sharpest observations from the book. Why invent a mention of the Brontës when there isn’t one in all of Little Women? 

The awkwardness of their conversation emerges, I think, from Gerwig’s characteristic earnestness; Hermione-like, she’s desperate for us to notice that she’s done her homework. Though she makes no mention of them in the novel, Louisa May Alcott was absolutely obsessed with the Brontës. The plots of both Behind the Mask and A Long Fatal Love Chase, two of her melodramas written under a male pseudonym, are essentially ripped from the pages of Jane Eyre. The first is the story of a governess who successfully marries the master of the house; the second of a lonely young woman swept off her feet by a man who turns out to be a bigamist and whom she flees into the arms of a handsome cleric. 

And it isn’t just the Brontës who get shout-outs in Gerwig’s breathtakingly literate script. Jo reads George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss to the dying Beth as they sit on the seashore. And hidden in the background of Amy’s speech to Laurie about the economic realities of marriage is the portrait of a lady who, though she isn’t Mary Wollstonecraft, looks tantalizingly like her; the empire waist, the turned neck, and the ribbon winding through the hair subtly evokes the face gracing the millions of copies of one of the most resounding calls for a woman’s right to an equal education ever written. 

One of the great triumphs and pleasures of Gerwig’s script is its dense, determined feminist intertextuality. Set in a time when women’s literary productivity was exploding – Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would purchase the home where the teenage Alcott first began writing, complained to his publisher that “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women” – the film, for all its contemporary resonance, honors the moment of its creation. It’s a story that’s not just about four sisters, but one that’s enabled by an entire mob of scribbler-sisters on whose shoulders Gerwig gratefully – if somewhat gawkishly – stands. 

****

But if Amy has been reading the Brontës, she doesn’t seem to have taken their stories to heart. If anyone has, it’s gentlemanly Jo. Though she might not take on a male pseudonym, as they did, she dons a man’s bowler hat and waistcoat for her negotiations with her publisher. 

In fact, I often find myself wondering to what extent Alcott – and Gerwig – modeled Jo not on Jane Eyre, but on the most underrated and overlooked heroine in the entire nineteenth-century canon: Lucy Snowe, protagonist of Villette. Published in 1853, fifteen years before Little Women, Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s final and – yes – her best novel. The conflicts Lucyfinds herself embroiled in almost exactly parallel those experienced by Jo. Like Jo, she travels to a bustling metropolitan city far away and works as a teacher. Like Jo, she finds herself sought after both by an irascible older professor and a charming young bachelor beloved by all the women in the area. 

And, like Jo, she finds that her rival for the heart of the charming young bachelor is a spoiled girl with golden curls and a silver laugh. For all of us who have ever felt the injustice Amy getting everything – all of us who, like Jo in Gerwig’s script, have “moment[s] of wanting to strike” the girls who float through life on the grace of good looks and good genes – for all of us who lurk, shadow-like, on the margins of others’ date nights and engagement parties and wedding days, Lucy’s words ring powerfully and painfully true: 

Is it possible that fine generous gentleman—handsome as a vision—offers you his honourable hand and gallant heart, and promises to protect your flimsy person and feckless mind through the storms and struggles of life…? Have you power to do this? Who gave you that power? Where is it? Does it lie all in your beauty—your pink and white complexion, and your yellow hair? Does this bind his soul at your feet, and bend his neck under your yoke? Does this purchase for you his affection, his tenderness, his thoughts, his hopes, his interest, his noble, cordial love…?

These scathing insults that Lucy hurls at Ginevra Fanshawe could well be the words of a Jo to an Amy, who tells her sisterwithin the first five pages that she “detests affected, nimmy-pimmy chits!” 

What strikes me about the passage, however, is how it makes male desire strange again. High cheekbones carry no guaranteeof virtue, nor are shapely lips the mark of good judgment. But the blessed few who bear these gifts – or who purchase them from the surgeon – find these qualities attributed to them in the courtroom, in the boardroom and, yes, on the apps. We listen to Amy’s speech to Laurie and congratulate ourselves that we’re no longer living in that world. Yes, we can make enough money to earn our own living, yes, we can make enough money to support our families, and no, we don’t have to surrender our children to our husbands as their property. 

But when I’m reminded by a cherished female mentor to put on mascara before an interview, when one of my clients praises a female employee for trying to “look her professional best” when she gave herself a bucket shower and headed to work in the wake of a home-destroying hurricane, when I spend my lunches listening to my coworkers swap tips on Botox and moisturizers and exfoliation, I wonder if we haven’t just widened the circle of male desire, if we haven’t just given men even more spaces to mistake beauty for talent and confuse desirability with professional ability. 

My colleagues and friends assure me otherwise, telling me that the hours they spend flat-ironing and cuticle-trimming and the money they spend on yoga and SoulCycle helps them feel like their best selves, gives them of a few hours in a busy week for self-care. But in an age where debt is skyrocketing and wages are stagnant, I – and many others with me – find myself asking if this isn’t just another version of Amy’s “economic proposition.” 

In the book, Laurie expresses puzzlement at the grace and elegance Amy has gained in the years they’ve been apart. She responds, “Tulle is cheap, posies to had for nothing, and I am used to making the most of my poor little things.” That last phrase succinctly summarizes the life of so many women I know, relentlessly optimizing the limited resources they have in hopes of one day securing better ones. It works then, as it works now: Our bosses seek traits like “hunger” and “the willingness to go the extra mile,” and Laurie “admire[s] the brave patience that made the most of opportunity” – and subsequently fills up her dance card with his name. 

Lucy refuses to optimize her assets, as does Jo, and their refusal has caused many readers to speculate that their real interest lies in the very pink cheeks and yellow hair they say they so despise. There’s plausible evidence for both readings. In a letter to intimate friend Ellen Nussey, Charlotte Brontë worries that “we are in danger of loving each other too well; of losing sight of the Creator in idolatry of the creature,” and in an interview, Alcott declared, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body…I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”

These queer erotic tensions play out in their work – quite literally. Lucy first attracts the attention of the charming young bachelor when she is abruptly forced to play the male love interest opposite the golden-haired, silver-toned Ginevra Fanshawe in a student production at the all-girls’ school where she works – a role, she finds to her dismay, she relishes. The same dynamics emerge in Gerwig’s Little Women: Professor Bhaer watches, enchanted, as Jo herself watches, enraptured, the moment in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night where Viola, a woman disguised as a man, woos Olivia, a beautiful noblewoman. 

As with viewers of Gerwig’s star turn in Frances Ha, readers of Lucy Snowe’s story often find themselves shaking the text, trying to make it confess its erotic secrets – a futile task, inasmuch as the novel, like Little Women, lays smack-dab in the middle a century that begins with the Yorkshire aristocrat Anne Lister writing her diary accounts of seducing women on neighboring estates in code and ends with Oscar Wilde in prison for daring to declare the beauty of “the love that dares not speak its name.” The struggle to name, to articulate, to claim a desire beyond the circle of male desire and the confines of the marriage plot took far longer than the life spans of these two women, who would die before the century’s close. 

****

Judging by the trailers and ads I’ve seen for the films in recent months, that struggle shows no sign of ending anytime soon. If marketers overlooked Amy’s limited list of female geniuses, their cuts to Jo’s speech were far more heinous – and far more telling. Trailers for the film clipped Jo’s speech where I ended it above, focusing on her righteous anger at the narrow constraints of the narratives women are allowed to live. 

We love this shit – and we’ve loved it since 1847. There’s a reason Jane Eyre was a hit as soon as it was published, a reason it’s been adapted even more frequently than Little Women, and a reason that it fills syllabi of English classes to this day. When Jane declares that “it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that [women] ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags,” we snap our fingers and retweet in agreement. 

It’s astoundingly prescient – Jane is literally telling male readers to check their privilege all the way back in the 1840s – and it’s the same ethos that fills the workshops, staff retreats, and conferences of corporate America. We know we can do it just as well as the men can and we’re sick of being relegated to the sentimental, the secondary, the sweet. We’re angry and we fill the streets and the ballot boxes and the board rooms. We support each other and we walk in lockstep towards equal pay, equal rights, and equal representation. 

But what interests me here isn’t Jo’s righteous anger. I joined hands with my girlfriends and marched the streets of Washington at the beginning of 2017, I cheered when AOC won the election in 2018, and I cranked up “The Man” in my car when Taylor Swift dropped the album in 2019. We’ve known for 173 years now the power and force of a woman’s anger; Jane wins her way into Mr. Rochester’s heart and ours not by silently melting into his arms, but by yelling at him. Accepted feminist wisdom holds that we can accept a women’s tears, but not her anger. Given the screen time that our collective rage has received in recent years – and the role it could well play on the debate stage in the coming months – I’m not so sure I buy that narrative anymore. 

What we’re still learning to tell is women’s loneliness. There’s a reason marketers cut that final, heartrending cry – “But I’m so lonely!”— from the trailers and TV spots. There’s a reason that Villette is relegated to the study of grumpy graduate students like me. There’s a reason that Hollywood has never bothered adapting it. The novel is a stark and uncompromising picture of what it means to be lonely in a world that is not kind to unpartnered women. Lucy is, in some respects, far worse off than Jo. No cozy Victorian domesticity for this heroine; her family never appears, and we are left to surmise at some unspecified disaster that leaves her totally alone. 

And even after Lucy travels to the Continent and secures a job at the boarding school, loneliness stalks her: When the school closes up for vacation, she is left alone in its large, empty halls and its quiet, dusty classrooms. As Carrie Hill Wilner observes, the chapter about this vacation is one of the most truthful accounts of depression ever written. Lucy vacillates between the manic highs of walks that take her miles and miles beyond the city walls and the lows of days where she cannot eat, cannot sleep, or, if she does sleep, finds herself terrorized by nightmares so overpowering that she cannot even scream.  

As in Little Women, two men step forth to save our heroine from her loneliness. [Spoilers hereafter]. It will surprise no one that the handsomer and shallower of the two ultimately decides against Lucy. It takes Lucy time to adjust to this loss, but like Jo, she acknowledges to herself that they will always have a place in one another’s hearts: 

I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the sky-lights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends…still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly spread; yet, gradually…he proved to me that he kept one little closet, over the door of which was written “Lucy’s Room.”

How many of us single women feel this – how many of us feel the space in our friends’ hearts and lives gradually growing smaller and smaller as husbands, careers, volunteer work, and children crowd us out until we’re given nothing more than “one little closet”? How many times have we had to text two, three, four times to get a partnered friend to schedule time for dinner or a drink, only to have them cancel at the last minute because of traffic delays, a sick kid, or just plain old laziness? How many times have we wanted to cry – But I’m so lonely! – and how many times have we held our tongues, knowing that to do so risks losing one of the few friendships that has managed to stick since graduation happened or the lease ended?

****

All is not lost, however, when the golden couple floats away to domestic bliss. Another man has had his eye on Lucy. LikeLouis Garrel’s unjustly charming Professor Bhaer, shuffled to the beginning of the film by Gerwig’s non-linear screenplay, Professor Paul Emanuel notices Lucy’s fiery temper and keen mind from very early on. She in turn notices his passionate, outspoken faith, his affection for children, and his deep love ofliterature. They quarrel not infrequently – Emanuel is not shy about telling Lucy when he thinks she’s wrong – but that very quarreling means their relationship crackles with an attraction at once erotic and intellectual. 

After they finally declare their love, Emanuel travels to the new world to build his fortune and plans to come back and claim Lucy as his bride within three years. With what money he has, he buys Lucy the space and supplies she needs to start a school. During their separation, letters fly back and forth across the ocean as rapidly as industrialization and steamships would allow.

But the letters stop and the book ends. “There is enough said,” Lucy concludes. “[L]eave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror…Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.” 

It’s a bullshit ending. Brontë had planned to kill off Emanuel and leave Lucy lonely, the same way Alcott planned to end her book by leaving Jo unmarried. But in both cases, male hands interfered: Alcott’s publisher insisted that Jo get herself a man, and Brontë’s father objected that her intended ending was too sad. 

So they both oblige – in the most maddening, frustrating way possible. Corpulent, prudish, and hairy, Book Bhaer is not a hero destined to send preteen hearts a pitter-patter and fanfiction writers into a fury. But Brontë is, if possible, even crueler. Does the professor come back? Does he marry the plucky young writer? Do they run the school together? 

As with Villette, so with Gerwig’s Little Women: We’ll never know. As others have observed, it’s unclear if Bhaer is Jo’shusband or her employee (or both!), and it’s unclear if the school even exists, or if Jo is just scribbling away, imagining the happy endings she cannot live. The final shot is a woman, steely-eyed and somber, clutching to her chest a book that she’s written in her own name – alone. 

****

Men’s loneliness is an established fact. Study after study shows that men are literally dying from loneliness, and headline after headline shows the effects of toxic masculinity on men’s families and their health. We know that men fail to form robust bonds or express vulnerability in the same way that we know that Martin Scorsese is a good filmmaker. The Irishman might be brilliant, but it’s brilliant in the same way Bruce Springsteen is; it tells us over the course of several long, extraordinary hours, what we already know to be true. 

Women’s loneliness, however, is far less certain. We’re supposed to be better at friendships, at vulnerability, at chasing down our partnered friends and ingratiating ourselves into their family life. We’re supposed to be finding happiness on the ladders we’re finally allowed to climb, the degrees we’re finally allowed to earn, the conquests we’re finally allowed to make, and the recognition we so richly deserve. 

I don’t know that I buy this either. We may not be as bad off as men are – but the cracks are starting to show and the platitudes are starting to wear thin. Dozens of outlets reported a shocking statistic this year: The rate of alcohol deaths for women had jumped by 85 percent between 1999 and 2017. In this particular arena, women aren’t just giving men a run for their money. We’re making them sprint for it. 

There are, of course, dozens of factors contributing to this jump. But if the sniffles and sobs I heard throughout the movie theatre a few days after Christmas were any indication, I’d imagine loneliness has something to do with it as well. 

To speak for myself: I saw the movie with the woman who’s been my best friend since I was fifteen, the girl who pulled the hairpins out of my hair after prom, who spent a week in Paris with me the summer after the semester we were both abroad, who held my hair the first time I got blisteringly drunk. And it hit close – too close. My friend, the gentler and more girly of the two of us, was recently engaged to a good man whom I, like Jo, deeply distrusted at first but who, like John Brooke, made her deeply happy. As the Marches danced around Meg at the Orchard House wedding, I whispered to her, “That’ll be you next fall.” 

Then it was my turn. I watched Jo, terribly single, bitterly lonely, make her speech to Marmee. I watched her brave her way from Concord to New York. I watched her dance, write, and run, uncertain of where she was headed but mustering up the courage to get there all the same.

As we left the theatre, mopping our eyes, I ventured, “I’d ask you to get a beer and talk about the movie with me –” 

Before she could open her mouth to mention her running routine, her new puppy, or her fiancé’s crazy work schedule, I finished my sentence. 

“—but I know it’s late and you’re a lark, not a nightingale. I’ll see you later.” 

I sobbed the entire drive back to my apartment and opened a beer immediately upon arrival. A few years ago, she and another dear friend of ours – now moved to the other side of the country and several years into a happy relationship – had read Villette together. Lucy Snowe guided us through the ups and downs of men who overlooked us, the realities of shitty jobs, and the sheer aimlessness of being 23 and not having a clue where life would take us next. 

We didn’t know to cherish these moments at the time; we were too busy wondering why no guys asked us out. But from where I sat in that empty apartment on a cold December night, those long conversations over cheap wine on our parents’ back porches looked pretty good. Jo laments that Meg’s marriage will make “an end of peace and fun and cozy times together…I shall break my heart and everything will be abominably uncomfortable.” Though in my case it was a combination of careers and men that took these women away from me, I felt their absence as resentfully as she did. 

Reader, I do not think that Little Women will win the Oscar, and I doubt that Ronan or Pugh will either. Women have fought for a long time to tell our own stories. When we’re finally allowed to open our mouths, we feel compelled to speak in solidarity. We support one another unequivocally and angrily defy at those who dare to silence us. We optimize whatever opportunities come our way. 

Gerwig’s Little Women does all this and more. Drawn from the center of the canon of women writers, it directs its attentions to the silenced emotions at the margins. It tells not only of women’s romantic passion, or their care for one another, or their anger at and triumph over the constraints of patriarchy. It also tells of the costs it takes to get there. It takes a long, hard look at the loneliness and despair that is the price of admittance to the club of geniuses. Other feminist projects overlook or obscure these emotions, focusing instead on the pleasures – and they are genuine ones! – of righteous indignation and sisterly solidarity. The hope is to lower the barriers to entry, to tell women they can call themselves feminists with as much as ease they can buy a pink hat on Amazon. 

But if the millions of women who see themselves in the tearful, frightened, lonely Jo tell us anything, it’s time to move on from such lies. Hollywood has shown us that it’s ready to honor women’s stories of lust, friendship, anger, and joy. Whether it is ready to honor women’s stories of loneliness remains to be seen.