{"id":15,"date":"2007-07-11T20:41:28","date_gmt":"2007-07-12T02:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/2007\/07\/11\/final-thoughts-on-jo-march\/"},"modified":"2007-07-11T20:50:58","modified_gmt":"2007-07-12T02:50:58","slug":"final-thoughts-on-jo-march","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/2007\/07\/11\/final-thoughts-on-jo-march\/","title":{"rendered":"Final thoughts on Jo March…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"quatre_filles_du_docteur_march_1933_little_women_7.jpg\"<\/a>With our closing up of Little Women <\/u>and its three film adaptations, I was trying to figure out which actress best portrayed the beloved firecracker.\u00c2\u00a0 Definitely not 1949’s June Allyson.\u00c2\u00a0 She’s chatty, annoying, and her cheesy smile hurts me.\u00c2\u00a0 In my opinion Winona Ryder is a better contender, though she seems fragile and nervous for the most part.\u00c2\u00a0 She can definitely carry the role of the tortured artist, and she conveys Jo’s fitfulness for change and growth.\u00c2\u00a0 Katharine Hepburn would have to be the winner though.\u00c2\u00a0 Physically she is more like Alcott’s Jo March, and she carries the headstrong spirit better than Ryder.\u00c2\u00a0 My only complaint is that Hepburn’s “Christopher Columbus!” is really exaggerated and made me wince after the 5th time I heard it.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s forgivable since she best represented the Jo that readers know and love.<\/p>\n

While I was thinking about the character of Jo March, something hit me that I hadn’t even thought of earlier.\u00c2\u00a0 But no, it couldn’t be true…could it?\u00c2\u00a0 Is it even right to ask this about one of America’s favorite characters?\u00c2\u00a0 But I can’t shake it.\u00c2\u00a0 Is Jo a proto-lesbian of the 19th century?\u00c2\u00a0 It seems presumptuous and maybe insulting, calling a woman a lesbian because she is strong and independent.\u00c2\u00a0 She energetically takes of the role of the man of the family while her father is away.\u00c2\u00a0 She says several times that she wishes she were a man.\u00c2\u00a0 She hates acting girly or dressing so.\u00c2\u00a0 Jo loves her sisters and wishes that they could all just stay together and love one another, and not need anyone else.\u00c2\u00a0 She expresses her wish to marry Meg so that they could stay together.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not insinuating incest here, though how interesting and twisted that would be, but for most of the book Jo doesn’t even entertain the notion of romantic love and is ambivalent to men and reacts strongly against advances.\u00c2\u00a0 When Jo married Professor Bhaer, it seemed more like a matching of intellectual passion rather than passionate love.\u00c2\u00a0 It is also suspect (and a bit strange) that he is old enough to be her father.\u00c2\u00a0 It seems that Jo has found a father figure to discuss literature with, and she’s taken care of the problem of what will become of her.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since there isn’t any hard-hitting evidence of her loving women romantically, then perhaps she still fits outside of traditional molds as an asexual woman that strongly identifies with the masculine side of the spectrum.\u00c2\u00a0 I have not read any of the sequels, but it would be interesting to see if any of this held weight in a broader portrait of her married life.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d love to hear opinions on this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With our closing up of Little Women and its three film adaptations, I was trying to figure out which actress best portrayed the beloved firecracker.\u00c2\u00a0 Definitely not 1949’s June Allyson.\u00c2\u00a0 She’s chatty, annoying, and her cheesy smile hurts me.\u00c2\u00a0 In … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/cdame2of\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}