Is it too much to ask that we examine the complexities in a young girl who acts out against her older sister and don’t simply write her off as a spoiled bitch? In film after novel after film, audiences learn to identify the humanity in a male villain who has often slain entire cities. I saw my younger self when Amy decided she could not afford to be good or selfless like her sisters because she needed to buy limes and fit in at school. I saw myself when Amy cried and bled outside of Laurie’s window. She is irredeemable! Who would act that way? They referred to Amy as both a “homewrecker” and a “C-U-Next-Tuesday.” After my own viewing of Little Women ended, I sat in the Cinemark with a very wet face while the two women behind me began dissecting what they’d seen. Multiple friends who did not grow up as Little Women fanatics texted me to express their disapproval of my identification with Amy March after watching Gerwig’s adaptation. Maybe Amy was really mad and knowingly burned her sister’s only manuscript because she did something wrong. That she’d at least had the foresight to compose a second copy of her life’s work. I’d like to think that Amy somehow knew about Google Drive and believed there was another copy of Jo’s work. My mom rubbed his back while I returned to my room and did my vowel exercises. I cried and tried explaining, but he was more self-righteous.
I was silly and irrational and absolutely would try to poison my only brother because he failed to invite me to the woods with his friends. Everyone yelled about how I tried to poison Michael for a couple of days afterwards-they seemed to simply accept, with little debate or reservation, that I would be that vindictive. When my brother called me a dumb baby and left to build forts in the woods behind our house with friends who I knew I needed to impress, I got mad and put lotion on his toothbrush so it would taste bad.
But I knew I was an Amy, and that is a little thing I like to call self-awareness. Everyone who reads Little Women nine times before entering middle school wishes they were a Jo. She asked me over and over again why I wasn’t a Jo, because she was a Beth-Jo hybrid-and did not understand the need to find a character who was not necessarily good. She wanted me to grow up knowing that my hair was not, in fact, my one true beauty, and that I could focus on pursuits grander than a defined jawline. My brother was smarter, so I was silly, and followed him and his friends around like a puppy trying to make them laugh. I spent hours every night as a child sounding out vowels in an exaggerated fashion because my grandmother told me it would define my jawline. From ages nine through 12 I told people that I wanted to be a trophy wife when I grew up. Because Jo’s hair is short for most of the book, I told her.
Why wouldn’t you dress up as Jo? My feminist mother was worried. It was also Halloween, and I was Amy March.
The front door behind us says “Go Sox!” It was 2004 and the Red Sox were in the World Series for the first time in decades. There’s a picture on my mom’s living room shelf of me and my older brother standing in front of our house-at nine, he has a beard, and at seven, I’m wearing a green Victorian dress with a lace lapel. I assigned them the roles of Jo or Meg or Beth, sometimes Marmie, but never Amy. I had been worried in my mother’s Subaru while we rode towards the theater-because before deciding if I was a Carrie or a Samantha or a Charlotte or a Miranda, I spent hours in my room with my dolls pondering the March sisters. It was a Thursday night in January, and I was at a Cinemark near my mom’s house, and I had my period and cried from the opening scene onwards, when Jo pitches her writing and Saoirse Ronan is feisty and runs home towards her sisters and I knew I needn’t worry and that it was perfect. When Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women ended, I was dehydrated.