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Having spent most of the summer researching Louisa May Alcott for a chapter in my ongoing project Creedless Christianity (and most of the autumn months writing it), the cinema release of yet another version of Little Women was a salutary reminder that I had not wasted my time. The influence of Alcott has not been measured adequately, nor to my knowledge judged.
The new film, like many modern films versions, is a twist on the original. Instead of Jo March being the heroine - the self-sacrificing, hard-working, dutiful Jo, all the publicity is centred on the character of Amy. She is the narcissist in the books, the self-absorbed and frivolous one - all modern virtues to be a heroine in the selfie generation.
Judging by interviews with the actress who plays Amy, the character has now become an ardent feminist, who can express the 20th century’s propaganda about the lot of women in the 19th century. It sounds even more dull and preaching than the original book, which Louisa May Alcott herself derided as “moral pap for the young”. Alcott’s was the 13th chapter I had written for Creedless Christianity and never before had I been forced to spend so long away from the subject to be submerged in the words of her puppet-masters. Louisa May Alcott surrendered her will, her mind and her soul at an early age to Ralph Waldo Emerson, her father Amos Bronson Alcott and writers such as Goethe and Thomas Carlyle. Her exhibitions of resentment against and dissatisfaction with Transcendentalism could not extract her from it. The poison was too deep in her bones. She would laugh at the Roman Catholic priest who offered to share the Gospel with her. She promoted Transcendentalist tenets by not rejecting them and by hating what her teachers hated. This is both implicit and explicit in Little Women. In a traditional film version of Little Women, Jo March is presented as the young woman struggling to break away from the strifling expectations of a society, which is regarded as “Christian”. It is not. It is the worst mongrel form of Transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism is bald humanism. It denies that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God and asserts the deity of Man. It says that we are not individuals: rather we are mere elements in the Ideal Man and the Ideal Woman. If we conform to agree with other people then we promote this unity. If we have a higher principle in seeking the glory of God (as every Christian should), then we thwart this aim and we become outcasts in society. This is cultural totalitarianism. He who defines the Ideal controls the minds of society. A new version of Little Women is just another opportunity to tell women how to conform to the Ideal Woman, defined for another generation.
This film will be presented as a feminist triumph over patriarchy. And anyone who thinks that was the aim of Alcott’s book is showing their ignorance. Louisa May Alcott knew the standard expected of her by Transcendentalism. She knew that she was supposed to be a submissive milk-sop, a wet-weekend, a frail and fragile lily in the New England pond. Louisa May Alcott’s character of Jo is a girl struggling to achieve this, struggling to become what she ought to be. She wants to be a “little woman”. This is a million miles from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I have set out to write seven more chapters before calling Creedless Christianity complete. It cannot be rushed, as each chapter is a small book in terms of research and scope. The previous release at the cinema to catch my eye was the Frozen sequel, based on Hans Christian Andersen. He is the subject of chapter 5 in Creedless Christianity. As Christmas approaches, I recall the difficulty I had dealing with Charles Dickens in chapter 7.
These people have cast very long shadows over our lives. Dickens, for instance, makes us adopt an artificial jollity at this time of year, a Pelagian fantasy that all the world is one big sugar lump of sweetness. One of my local “vicars” has pretty much said the same in her “Christmas message”:
So if for you Christmas is little more than just a good story, think again, because in the dust and dirt of human existence we all need the jewels; the acts of compassion, love and kindness, signs of hope and joy. Those images of new birth and re-creation are what keep us living our lives to the full.
Wrong. We need the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God in Power, the Lord of All Creation, the Judge, the King.
I had the pleasure to read a very special book alongside my research into Louisa May Alcott. It was a true account written by a young woman in memorial of an invalid sister and the wonderful sister who had nursed her only to die a few years later in childbirth in the 1850s. We have the lives of three Christian women pressed into the pages like flowers from a long ago summer. They do not present an ideal woman - they show us how Christians in adversity live day to day by leaning on the Rock of their Salvation, how they find the strength to work, the courage to hope, the faith to trust, the love to endure - not because they possess any of these qualities in themselves but because they fill their cup daily from their Master’s hand and look to him for everything. Lord willing, I would like to reprint this delightful, encouraging and worthy book in the near future. To God be the glory.