Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of “Little Women” lacks heart

By E.W.

EARLIER THIS year “This American Life”, an American public-radio show and podcast, ran a remarkable segment in a broadcast called “The Weight of Words”. Listeners heard the story of Shamyla, an ordinary American child who grew up in suburban Maryland in the late 1980s. But at the age of 12 she was taken on a trip to Pakistan, where much of her family still lived, and she was, in essence, held captive for years on end. She had one book in her possession: Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”.

Published in the years immediately after the American civil war, Alcott’s novel presents the lives of the March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy—and their mother, “Marmee”, who are left to fend for themselves while their father is away serving as a chaplain in the Union Army. The book became, for Shamyla, both a talisman and a book of instruction: it offered an image of freedom, in the wilfulness and creativity of its central heroine, Jo. It offered too a model of how Shamyla might be made to survive in conservative Pakistani society, by marrying and behaving as a “proper” woman should. “I felt like I lived with them,” Shamyla said of the characters.