YMMV / Little Women

• Accidental Aesop:
  • The burned manuscript episode — if you do something unbelievably cruel to a friend or loved one and unsurprisingly don't get forgiven right away, put yourself in mortal peril and everything will be alright.
  • The Princess Diaries has another: keep backup copies of your beloved works.
  • Writing genre fiction that your readers love to pay the bills means you're not being true to yourself as a writer.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Great Aunt March is a bitter old lady, and the girls have very little love for her. But after she dies, Marmee implies that she was really just very lonely — "her blessings became a burden because she had none to share them with" — and the girls acting as her companions could be because the old lady wants some company and attention since she had no living children. The fact that she did have a daughter who died at a young age, and that she's a widow too, might imply that her bitterness stems from deep grief.
  • The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry between Jo and Amy. Is it mutual head-butting between two strong-willed, attention-seeking sisters who are too different in some ways yet Too Much Alike in others, with both equally to blame? Or is Amy an insufferable Bratty Half-Pint whom Jo understandably mocks and loses patience with? Or is Jo a Big Sister Bully who unfairly puts Amy down until Amy understandably snaps and retaliates? How readers feel about Amy in general tends to effect how they view her relationship with Jo.
• Base-Breaking Character: There are fans who dislike Amy for being a Bratty Half-Pint and burning Jo's manuscript as a child, and becoming too annoyingly perfect as she grows up, to the point of Character Shilling. Other fans appreciate Amy's Character Development, and find her an interesting Foil to Jo, in that she's intelligent, stubborn, and ambitious like her sister, despite being on the opposite side of the Tomboy and Girly Girl trope.
• Broken Base: Are Jo and Fritz an excellent match, with the unconventional, "unromantic" nature of both characters and their courtship making them all the more suited to each other? Or, as thousands of readers have insisted, should Jo have married Laurie? Or should Jo have remained single in the end, as Alcott originally intended and as she herself did? Which of the possible endings would have been the happiest for Jo, the most natural conclusion to her arc, and/or the most feminist has been debated for many years. Notably, the 2019 film adaptation leaves the ending open, with a publisher insisting that Jo's analog in her own story get married, after which we see the proposal.
• Common Knowledge:
  • This book is sometimes dismissed in pop culture as an idyllic, idealized portrait of loving sisters with no realistic Sibling Rivalry. But while there might be some truth in this for Meg, Jo, and Beth's relationships with each other, and for Meg and Beth's with Amy, it's not true at all for Jo and Amy, whose Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry is sometimes very nasty.
  • Likewise, readers tend to remember Beth as a completely angelic character, too inhumanly perfect to live. They forget that while she is slightly idealized compared to the other three sisters, she's no little Eva St. Clare – she struggles with intense shyness, has moments of frustration and laziness too, and at one point forgets to feed her pet bird for a whole week, which results in his death.
  • It's widely assumed that Laurie is still in love with Jo in the end and only settles for marrying Amy instead. But the book makes it clear that gradually, and after some inner resistance at first, he genuinely falls in love with Amy and realizes that he and Jo are Better as Friends, only actively courting Amy after confirming to himself beyond all doubt that he no longer has romantic feelings for Jo.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Modern readers sometimes guess that Beth is on the autism spectrum and/or has social anxiety disorder, due to her extreme shyness and fear of strangers, her tendency to be childlike for her age, and to live in "a happy world of her own," and her reluctance to ever live apart from her parents even after she grows up.
• Die for Our Ship:
  • Amy. To this day there are still people invested in demonizing her for preventing Jo/Laurie. While conveniently letting Laurie off the hook, despite him pushing his feelings on Jo to the point of getting rejected twice, and her feeling that she has to move to New York to keep things from getting worse.
  • Fredrich "Fritz" Bhaer will get this occasionally by fans as well due to his horrible crime of not being Laurie.
• Fair for Its Day: The series was actually comparatively feminist by the standards of the time — especially Jo's Boys, which is set in a co-ed college, struggles openly with the concepts of gender equality, and comes to some surprisingly modern conclusions. Nan in particular is portrayed as a capable and independent young woman who treats Tommy Bangs' insistence on their Childhood Marriage Promise with amusement, choosing to pursue her medical studies instead and becoming a successful single doctor. Daisy's own choice to marry her Childhood Friend Romance Nat and become a Housewife is also seen as valid and worthy of respect. It makes sense when you consider that Alcott wrote her books during feminism's first wave. Alcott's parents were friends with a number of well-known intellectuals, including women’s rights activists. Josie puts it to Mr. March directly:
  "Grandpa, must women always obey men and say they are the wisest, just because they are the strongest?" she cried, looking fiercely at her cousin, who came stalking up with a provoking smile on the boyish face that was always very comical atop of that tall figure.
  "Well, my dear, that is the old-fashioned belief, and it will take some time to change it. But I think the woman's hour has struck; and it looks to me as if the boys must do their best, for the girls are abreast now, and may reach the goal first," answered Mr March, surveying with paternal satisfaction the bright faces of the young women, who were among the best students in the college.
• Fan Nickname: "The Jo Show", given to the various film and stage adaptations that focus more exclusively on Jo than the book does and shortchange the other sisters' character arcs.
• Fanon: Some people believe Amy's name is short for 'Amelia', due to her sisters being referred to by nicknames, but her name is just Amy. In real life, of course, while sometimes used as a nickname for 'Amelia', 'Amy' is actually the English variant of the old French name 'Amée', and a name in its own right. A 1986 Italian retelling that resets the story in Rome does change Amy's name to 'Amelia', though Meg, Jo, and Beth also become 'Margherita', 'Gio' and 'Bettina' in that novel.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Jo and Laurie. The original 19th-century fandom also shipped them. Alcott paired him with Amy partly out of annoyance at their focus on the romance.
• First Installment Wins: The first book has been adapted many times — including five films. The sequels get less adaptation love.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • The book is extremely popular in Japan, and there are three anime and numerous manga adaptations; the most popular sister seems to be a tie between Meg and Beth. Japan also treats Amy much better than US readers do, where she is considered the least liked of the sisters, especially since she is the main focus and narrator of the 1987 anime adaptation.
  • The books are well-beloved in the UK, considering the first film adaptation (1917) and first two television adaptations (1950 and 1958) came from England (it didn't save them from being lost, however), as did two later BBC miniseries (1970 and 2017).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • An out-of-universe example in Alcott's journal about her publisher's request to write a book for girls (info in brackets added by troper):
    Marmee, Anna (Meg's real-life counterpart), and May (Amy's real-life counterpart) all approve of my plan. So I plod away, though I don't enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.
    (Added later after the novel's publication and success) Good joke.
  • At the end of Little Women one of the students at the Bhaers' school is "a merry little quadroon, who could not be taken in elsewhere". By the time Ms Alcott wrote Little Men this character had been replaced with (mixed-race) Dan. Now imagine Dan with "the sweetest voice of all".
  • In the 1994 film, Jo says she's not fashionable enough to live in London. Winona Ryder had played a Victorian Londoner in Bram Stoker's Dracula two years earlier (and indeed her character is the less fashionable one contrasted to a more glamorous friend).
  • Jo's first suitor is called "Teddy" (her personal nickname for Laurie) and her eventual husband is named "Bhaer." And then she names her son after Laurie, so his name is Teddy Bhaer. The term "teddy bear" wouldn't be coined until 1902.
• Hollywood Homely: All the movie adaptations have cast very beautiful actresses to interpret the self-described "plain" Jo March, leading to the unintentionally hilarious moment when Jo has her hair cut off and a very shocked Amy cries: "Jo, your one beauty!". The Winona Ryder version even has her declare that she is "ugly and awkward" - and it's even more egregious when Meg is supposed to be the beauty of the sisters, when Winona Ryder is just as cute as Trini Alvarado. At least Katharine Hepburn in the most famous earlier adaptation isn't a classic beauty, and manages to make young Jo coltish and a bit clumsy.
• It Was His Sled: Beth dies, and you can thank Friends for giving it away. It's also widely known that Jo and Laurie don't end up together.
• LGBT Fanbase: Jo has a following amongst both queer women and trans men due to her tomboyishness and ambiguous dialogue, which were intended to be Jo hating gender roles but can be interpreted as accidentally 'trans-sounding.'
• Memetic Mutation: The 2019 film gave us "I can't, I can't! I tried it and I failed! I can't!"
• Misaimed Fandom: Alcott was upset to see her female readers focus less on Jo's struggle to be a writer and live her life the way she wanted to, and much more on whether she and Laurie would end up married. Hence why her Ship Sinking was so determined.
  "Girls write to ask who the Little Women will marry as if that were the only aim of a woman's life. I won't marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone."
• Moe: Beth, as she's an ill girl but still very sweet. Margaret O'Brien proved to be such in the 1949 film, reducing her co-star June Allyson to tears during one emotional scene.
• Narm:
  • The "Jo, your one beauty!" line from Amy after the former cuts off her hair tends to come off like this on film, as it's missing the narrator's careful buildup re: Jo's appearance. Without it, the line reads as Amy being rather blunt about how bad her sister looks now.
  • The phonetically-written Baby Talk of Daisy and Demi Brooke as toddlers. Their use of "me" for "I" and third-person grammar (e.g. "Me loves evvybody") reads more like Hulk Speak than like the real speech of small children.
• Narm Charm:
  • Little Women plots a course through wildly extravagant and sentimental prose, Aesops (some of them rather questionable) in nearly every chapter... and comes out as a gripping romantic drama with a deserved place in the highest pantheon of American literature.
  • The famous climax between Jo and Professor Bhaer - "I have nothing to give you, my hands are empty", takes his hand in hers, "not empty now" - should be unbelievably cheesy, but it's one of the biggest happy Tear Jerkers you'll find in both book and film.
• Never Live It Down: Many readers have never forgiven Amy for burning Jo's manuscript out of spite, regardless of any Character Development that follows.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading:
  • There's a moment in Part 1 when Laurie compliments Beth on her music, which almost seems to hint at a spark between the two of them. This is the only significant moment they share, but it could have provided an interesting twist in the development.
  • Fans felt that Laurie and Jo were much more evenly matched than Jo is with Fritz, even with Louisa May Alcott trying to stress that they were Like Brother and Sister; the courtship between Jo and Fritz is rather asexual (which makes sense if you know that the publishers insisted Jo marry, while her original intent was for her to live unmarried). The 1994 film fixes this by giving them much more chemistry in the romance. The 2019 movie leaves whether or not Jo gets married ambiguous (due to its non-linear structure) with a slight leaning towards "no". It's not made clear if she actually runs after Friedrich, marries him, and then opens a school or if she was simply making a concession to her editor to get her book published in the Story Within a Story.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Amy in the more recent adaptations, to a certain extent, as earlier adaptations tend to lean much more heavily on her whiny, brattish behavior as a child. The 1994 film in particular explicitly presents a more natural and likable child-Amy in Kirsten Dunst. Florence Pugh even got nominated for an Oscar for the 2019 version.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • In the 1949 version Meg is played by Janet Leigh in one of her earliest roles. The same film was also the Hollywood debut of Italian actor Rossano Brazzi, who'd be best known for South Pacific.
  • The 1994 film was also the debut for Claire Danes long before her more remembered turns in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Stardust and of course Homeland. It was also the second film for Kirsten Dunst after Interview with the Vampire (which came out the same year). Acclaimed voice actress Andrea Libman also has a small role as one of the girls Jo tutors in New York, though she has no lines.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Amy, like all the characters who suffer from Die for Our Ship, gets more hate than she likely deserves. While burning Jo's book was awful, she was just a child, and she immediately regrets it when she sees how badly she's hurt Jo—who soon forgives her for it. Many fans like to ignore all her Character Development in her later years—including the last chapters of the first book describing how she has turned a new leaf and wants to be more selfless—and claim she is still a shallow brat who only ends up with Laurie because she is a Gold Digger, even though she turns down the chance to marry an even richer man and explicitly marries Laurie for love.
  • Some fans go overboard with bashing the Hummels for getting Beth sick with scarlet fever, as if it was part of some evil plot when it was just an unfortunate circumstance.
• Signature Scene:
  • The four March sisters gathered around Marmee's chair as she reads them their father's letter. An image recreated by countless illustrators, as well as in all the major adaptations, and even featured on This Very Wiki as the main page image.
  • Amy spitefully telling Jo she burned her book and the chaos that follows as a result. Most notable is the evening scene where Jo refuses to sing with the family and Amy cries from knowing she's not forgiven.
  • Laurie's marriage proposal and Jo's refusal.
  • Beth's death.
• Sweetness Aversion:
  • Can inspire such feelings from a modern reader unused to the straight-forwardly sentimental tone and earnest moralising very typical of children's literature of the time.
  • Beth in the 1949 film version is so cloyingly cute that her scenes lose their poignancy.
  • The chapter in Part 2 that focuses on Demi and Daisy (Meg and John's children) tries very hard to make them seem cute and lovable, but their cuteness becomes so overblown that it can fall into this trope.
• Tear Dryer: The 1994 film's climax is Professor Bhaer delivering Jo's published manuscript and then informing her he's immediately catching a train to head west, leaving Jo looking very sad that she might not see him again. He then grudgingly congratulates her on getting married...and Jo realises the mistake and excitedly tells him it's her sister that's married, not her. And then the most beautiful exchange follows.
  Bhaer: Jo...such a little name for such a person. Will you have me?
  Jo: With all of my heart!
  The two embrace happily.
  Bhaer: But, I have nothing to give you. My hands are empty.
  Jo: (taking his hand in hers) Not empty now.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Jo, when Amy burns her manuscript because Jo doesn't take her on an outing to the theatre. As per the moral imperative, the intended focus of the chapter (actually called "Jo Meets Apollyon") is clearly Jo's recognition of and resolve to control her violent temper. The modern reader is much more likely to home in on the fact that it was the only copy of the manuscript that Jo had spent years pouring her heart into; and she's expected to forgive Amy almost right off the bat after something so utterly precious to her has been cruelly destroyed. Adding to which Amy — who doesn't appear to have been punished for her act, other than being mildly scolded by their mother — however genuinely remorseful she might be at first, quickly gets petulant when she isn't forgiven right away. And when Jo goes out skating with Laurie, leading Amy to whine about missing another outing, Meg doesn't help matters at all by blithely suggesting that the little girl tag along where she clearly isn't wanted. The 2019 version makes it even worse, where Amy is shown maliciously burning every page of the manuscript individually, and then gloating to Jo that she outright wanted to hurt her. Marmee reacts with apparent indifference, and just says "don't let the sun go down on your anger". By contrast, the 1994 version has Amy realising she went too far and Kirsten Dunst effectively conveys that the girl really means it when she apologises. That said, while Amy burning Jo's manuscript is a bad thing, what Jo does to Amy later when they go ice skating (purposely neglecting to tell Amy about the rotten ice because she's still angry at Amy) is also a cruel Kick the Dog moment, since it's dangerous and Amy could have died. In fact, it's only after this moment that Jo is portrayed in the wrong and her temper is discussed as a problem she needs to resolve.
• Values Dissonance: Unavoidable, given the books were written circa 1870.
  • The relationship between Jo and Bhaer seems weirdly unromantic by modern standards, especially compared to what one might expect for young, spirited, independent Jo. The 1994 film goes out of its way to give them a more romantic love story. The 2019 movie plays with the relationship in a very meta way and ultimately leaves whether or not they actually got married or if it was a concession Jo gives her editor to get her own book published up to the viewer’s interpretation (but slightly leaning towards the latter).
  • Jo's, and the author's, open fangirling over German thought and culture, while very much in keeping with the fashions of the time (yes, there was a period during which Germans were stereotyped as sentimental philosophers) eventually got a little awkward given German-American relations in the first half of the 20th century. Things have improved dramatically since, of course, but it's still faintly bemusing to the modern reader.
  • Interestingly, the different film versions of Little Women all echo the values of the time in which they were made, to the point of contradicting each other:
    When we view the 1933 version, When we view we are reminded of a nation during the Depression that needed to see the March girls' benign poverty and nostalgic family togetherness. The 1949 version, with its two shopping trips, reinforces how important it is for a woman to be a consumer, and the 1994 version supports strong, unconventional, feminist women.
  • There's also some anti-Irish prejudice, despite the fact that in most adaptations, Hannah, the family maid, is Irish. One notable example when Amy is punished for bringing pickled limes to school and is forced to throw them out the window, her humiliation is completed when the limes are eaten by Irish kids, whom the "respectable" school children consider their enemies.
  • While Little Women is usually very Fair for Its Day, there are still plenty of moments where we're reminded that girls should hold Acceptable Feminine Goals and Traits above all others. Even Tomboy Jo says:
    "My girls shall learn all I can teach them about [needlework], even if they give up the Latin, Algebra, and half-a-dozen ologies it is considered necessary for girls to muddle their poor brains over now-a-days."
  • Jo is told off by Professor Bhaer for writing stories about monsters, vampires and adventures — and it's her Coming of Age Story about her sisters that gets her critical acclaim. Horror stories would be seen as crowd pleasing pulp at best in those days, but critical respect for well-written genre fiction is much warmer nowadays. So in some ways Bhaer comes across as a bit of a genre snob.
  • Amy scoffs at Laurie for writing operas and focusing on art, insisting he work with his grandfather even though he doesn't like that idea. This is because the man was expected to be a provider, even though Laurie has the money to focus on his art. In the 1994 film he even highlights the Double Standard that Amy can focus on art while mooching off Aunt March and she would do the same if married to a rich man.
  • During "Jo Meets Apollyon," the emphasis is more on Jo forgiving Amy than Amy suffering punishment for burning Jo's book out of spite for not going on an outing. Amy has to be told that she destroyed a copy with no backups before she segues from Never My Fault to My God, What Have I Done?, and Marmee thinks the lecture and everyone being disappointed in her is sufficient punishment. The narrative itself has to deliver Laser-Guided Karma via Amy whining that Jo is not taking her ice-skating — when Jo has every right to leave her at home as punishment — and that she skates over rotten ice and falls in, which means no more outings for her until she gets better. In the twentieth century, Jo is within her rights to not wanting to accept Amy's apology, which is more self-serving Secretly Selfish, and the parents involved would be firmer towards a sibling old enough to know better. Consider what happened in Beverly Cleary's Beezus and Ramona when Ramona damages Beezus's things out of not knowing better or being bratty; she's sent to her room to think about what she did, and Aunt Beatrice recalls laughingly that she was punished as a child for writing in every page of her older sister Dorothy's autograph album in a fit of spite. Also worth noting is that Ramona is four years old in Beezus and Ramona, compared to Amy's twelve.
  • In "Experiments," Marmee's Radish Cure of letting the girls go for a week without chores to teach them that all play is as bad as all work includes letting Beth's pet bird Pip die because Beth neglects to feed him. With more recent attitudes toward animal rights, a modern parent would probably have reminded Beth to feed the bird even before the "experiment" was over, or else fed him herself, regardless of the lesson his death would have taught her. Because of this, Pip is generally cut from most adaptations, save the 1981 anime, where he dies of old age instead of starving.
  • The descriptions of the various foreigners Amy sees in Europe include references to "meek Jews" and to "a large-nosed Jew" at a party. While it's not outright anti-Semitism and no more stereotypical than the descriptions of other national groups in the same chapter (in fact less unflattering than the references to "haughty English" and "ugly Russians"), those references still wouldn't be found in a book written today.
  • John Brooke insists on using the "cry it out" method to get the fussy toddler Demi to sleep despite Meg's objections; nowadays, many psychologists argue that this method does more harm than good. Although to be fair, Demi is only left to cry for a short time and is still awake when his parents finally come and comfort him, so Alcott seems to be advocating the Ferber method more than a simple "cry it out."
• Values Resonance:
  • The 1933 film was so successful in part because the story of the family’s perseverance throughout financial hardship clicked with the audience who was living through the worst year of the Great Depression.
  • Marmee's quote in the book "Better be happy old maids, than unhappy wives!"
  • The way Meg and John resolve their marital struggles after the birth of their twins stands out in promoting co-parenting, self-care for mothers, and marriage as an equal partnership. At first, when Meg does all the childcare, she feels overwhelmed, and John feels useless and left out, which leads him to leave the house often to visit friends, making Meg feel neglected. But when John takes a more active role in raising the twins alongside Meg, when they allow Hannah to babysit more often to give them valuable time for themselves and each other, and when they both make more of an effort to share each other's interests instead of living in separate gendered worlds, their marriage emerges stronger than ever.
• The Woobie: Beth. Jo definitely has her moments as well.

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