Everything Is Known and Loved Because It Is Known: Familial Song in Little Women
I wasn’t quite sure what drew me to buy a ticket to the new Little Women movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, until I was sitting in the theater. Only as the opening scenes sang into motion did I realize that the aura surrounding the film whispered to me in the voice of my mother, years ago, urging me to read the book—that she could see something in it that I needed. It felt fitting that her voice resonated in my ears as the film played in front of my eyes.
Little Women follows the March family, made up of four sisters and their parents. In their youth, Amy longs to be an artist, Meg an actress, Jo a writer, Beth a musician. We follow their stories from childhood to their realization of more nuanced dreams.
As I watched the movie I was struck by the deeply tender relationship between Beth and Jo. Beth loves to play piano but has been sickly since a severe illness in her childhood; Jo nurses her to health when they are young and tries to do so again in adulthood, but is eventually unsuccessful. The film shifts in timeline from present to past, overlaying the two with startling warmth and clarity. We wander through the consciousness of the March family’s memories. Beth’s two distinct cases of scarlet fever—one earlier and the other to which she eventually succumbs later in life—are placed next to each other.
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Jo prepares to give up living independently at a boarding house in New York in order to take care of Beth, hoping her sister will beat the sickness like the first time. But before she leaves the boarding house, Jo shows her writing to Professor Friedrich Bhaer, the man with whom she will later fall in love. When he suggests that she try more personal forms of writing rather than solely writing to appease her elderly editor, Jo becomes defensive, her identity as an artist shaken.
For Beth’s health, Jo takes her back to the sea as she had once before in childhood. They lie there together on blankets on the sand. Yet this second beach scene is so much different from the first, which is bright with people playing, swift instrumental music exciting the background. Before settling into this second visit to the ocean, a more melancholy scene that lacks the same vivacity of the original, we see Jo and Beth running together as children. Jo reads aloud a George Eliot quote for her sister: “what novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”. The musicality of this line is so startling to me, how accurately it portrays the softness of the love between the sisters, how blessed they are to be known in this way. Once more I think of my mother—the incredible gift of being seen like this.
This second beach scene aches with muted colors and an overcast sky. A piano fades gently in and out, bridging the sisters’ voices. Beth tells Jo that she loves hearing Jo read but that she loves even more to hear Jo’s own stories. She asks Jo to write something in this moment. When Jo says that she doesn’t write anymore, Beth asks Jo to write something “for me”. Jo, Beth affirms, is “a writer ... even before anyone knew or paid you”.
It is a profound act of love, one that goes beyond the wish for commercial success, the hankering after what will sell. Beth asks Jo to write stories like the ones she used to—not grand in scale, but true, full of hope and music. These are not the pieces Jo sent to her editor to be published, the ones based entirely outside of her experience. And though Jo did not—perhaps could not—listen to the professor, she hears Beth’s voice. She wants to bring Beth joy with her own kind of music, a form that remembers Beth and their family.
The scene cuts to Jo, working tirelessly on a new book, scribbling pages all night, re-ordering them, splaying them on the floor of the room. She believes this is a story that needs to be told: small moments worthy of remembering, her family’s voices played over and over again until they sound so close to music.
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Years after Beth succumbs to scarlet fever, Jo inherits the boarding house and turns it into a school where her sisters can create while at the same time contributing to the development of artistic pursuits for children. Jo watches the production and binding of her book with presence and confidence, existing fully inside the joy of the music she’s made in honor of her sister. As the book is bound, we see Jo walk the halls of her new school. Her husband teaches violin, Meg teaches acting, and Amy teaches painting. In her flowing dress and the comfortable, slow way in which she walks, we feel grounded alongside Jo, aware as she is of our place in the world and in the story of this family. As the people she loves gather, her book takes up the whole screen, bound in deep red with extra gold dusted off of its cover.
Jo sits at the window watching, and the book is placed in her hands. She holds it flat against her body and smiles. Takes deep breaths. Sits in the memory of the loss, the music, the weight of what she holds in her arms.