LITTLE WOMEN, GRETA GERWIG’S second feature film as writer
and solo director, is about female authorship, as well as a lauded
example of it. The film has earned Gerwig an Oscar nomination for
writing, her second in that category. The omission of a parallel repeat
nod in the directing category has been widely bemoaned (#StillSoWhiteAndMale),
but “authorship” usefully blurs distinctions between writing and
directing, literature and film. In adapting Louisa May Alcott’s 1868–’69
best seller, Gerwig places herself in a long tradition of female
creators in the commercial realm of American culture, where the
successful appeal to female audiences authorizes expression and power
not sanctioned elsewhere.
There is already a formidably feminist version of Little Women, written by Robin Swicord and directed by Gillian Armstrong (famous for her debut film, My Brilliant Career [1979],
which is also about a 19th-century heroine whose writing career
conflicts with expectations that women must marry). The 1994 Little Women
respects the novel’s chronology. A Nigella Lawson–worthy Christmas
breakfast invites the viewer’s longing to join the female family group,
and shots through the frosted windowpanes visually link the whiteness of
New England snow to the skin of its A-list ingenue cast. Gerwig chooses
to put the emphasis more explicitly on authorship by messing with
linear plot, opening and closing her film with Jo March (a Louisa May
Alcott stand-in) played by Saoirse Ronan (a Greta Gerwig stand-in),
visiting the office of Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts), her publisher.
In the opening scene, Jo is there to pitch a sensational story for “a
friend,” but her ink-stained fingers betray her own hand in writing it.
In the concluding scene, she negotiates to retain copyright of the
autobiographical novel she’s produced while her three beloved sisters
were busy getting married or dying young. Dashwood’s daughters have
persuaded him to release the novel, and he’s predictably trying to
lowball its author. To anyone who has been paying attention to
Hollywood’s self-marketing under the spotlight of Time’s Up, this
narrative frame clearly alludes to current efforts to increase the
number of women directors and the pay grade of women creatives, as
federal investigations, sexual harassment cases, watchdog groups, and
data-driven studies have finally made the industry’s century-plus
exclusionary practices look shameful. (Things are improving in some areas
according to Stacy L. Smith of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative,
which crunches the annual numbers — 2020 promises not one but four
superhero films helmed by women, admittedly a questionable criterion.)
Authorship is what film critics call it when the director’s vision
shines through the commodity form of cinema. Female authorship is what
feminist film scholars look at, not because they believe in innate
differences between woman- and man-made films, or ascribe to some
mystical notion of individual genius, but because the work of
female-identified creators so often addresses the private experience and
structural determinants of life under patriarchy in importantly public
ways. As Richard Dyer explains in his essay, “Believing in Fairies: The
Author and the Homosexual,” identity categories may politicize
authorship in ways that deserve attention, even from critics skeptical
of “pure” expression and suspicious of opportunistic branding. Gerwig’s
oeuvre, which combines the visibility of the actor/celebrity, the
interiority of the writer, and the evidence of the director’s
well-informed choices, makes for a revealing case study.
Gerwig’s Little Women, and its framing device, offers a
relatively comforting vision of the Female Author as one who sticks to
her own story rather than aspiring to Important Subjects or introducing
Others. Jo (and Alcott before her) writes about her life with her
mother, sisters, housekeeper, and aunt. (Voilà! Seven plum roles for
white actresses.) Adapting her favorite novel, Gerwig expands the vision
of female self-invention she realized in her first feature as writer
and solo director, Lady Bird (in which Ronan also starred). In
addition, this Female Author figure produces work that makes a generic
appeal to women and girls. Jo’s creator, Louisa May Alcott, was guided
to produce her series of domestic novels for young readers by a
19th-century literary marketplace primed by what Nathaniel Hawthorne
famously dubbed a “damned mob of scribbling women.” Gerwig brought her
talents to a canny remake of a feminist “chick flick” already in
progress. ... [mehr] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ambidextrous-authorship-greta-gerwig-and-the-politics-of-womens-genres/
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