Compare and Contrast Little Women the Book and the Movie

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Compare and Contrast Little Women the Book and the Movie
Little Women was written originally in 1868-69 by Louisa May Alcott, as a means of trying to write a new type of work over and above what she normally wrote. The novel concerns the lives of four sisters – Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy – during the time that they are waiting for their father to come back from the Civil War. The story follows them as they begin to grow up and accept the changes that adulthood is bringing to their lives. There have been a number of film and TV adaptations made of Little Women over the years, but the 1994 version of Little Women which stars Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder as Marmee and Jo, respectively is perhaps the main one to be compared to the original novel. This film was chosen because, while it does follow the plot quite faithfully, there are several examples of when plot and characterisation were changed in ways which drastically changed how the story can be perceived.
This paper aims to be take the plot, characterisation, and themes of the 1994 adaptation, and directly compare them to the plot, characterisation, and themes of the original novel. To this end, characterisation will focus on Amy and Laurie, with the Hummel family straddling the line between characterisation and theme. The contrast in plot between the adaptation and the original novel will be discussed with the arc between Jo and Professor Bhaer, and the themes of both novel and movie will be discussed using the Hummels.
The characterisation of Amy (played in early years in the film by Kirsten Dunst), is illuminated by the way in which the film handles the ‘limes’ incident at Amy’s school. The conversation in the run up to it is almost exactly the same, leading to Meg gifting Amy the rag money for the month to try and “restore [her] credit” (Alcott 76). In the interests of total accuracy, of course, it should be mentioned that while in the book Meg gave Amy the rag money she had for that month, in the book Amy brings it up herself, to talk about how she won’t have it for another month.
Meg bathed the insulted hand with glycerine and tears, Beth felt that even her beloved kittens would fail as a balm for griefs like this, Jo wrathfully proposed that Mr. Davis be arrested without delay, and Hannah shook her fist at the “villain” and pounded potatoes for dinner as if she had him under her pestle. (Alcott 80)
Of course, instead of simply having Amy leaving the school at around lunchtime, the film has Jo noticing her poor sister sobbing at the gate of Plumfield (1994), and immediately assumes that something has happened to their Father. This change was most likely made for the sake of drama, and is fairly minor in nature, with its inclusion in the film seems likely to be an effort to remind audiences of why the women are on their own. Laurie is another character who can be said to have made the transition from book to film with most if not all of his basic nature and characterisation intact; in the book he is an impetuous, energetic boy\man, and in the film, he is an impetuous, energetic boy/man. We lose the full extent of his dandiness in the movie, with the descriptions of his attention to fashion in several areas taken away (Alcott 289), and (crucially) we miss Amy chastising him with a deliberate reference to his gloves (484). We do, however, see the changes that happen to him over the course of the film, and they mirror those changes which happen in the book. Laurie is a character who is of strong moral principles, as we see in both book and movie when he not only chastises Meg (though gently) for acting in the manner that she does while with the Moffat family (Alcott 105-106), but also apologises and helps her through her ensuing depression afterwards (Alcott 106-107) when she realises just how silly she’s been.
The Hummels family does have much less of a presence when it comes to the film, but they are more or less entirely the same throughout both mediums. The Hummels, it is fair to say, aren’t characters in the strictest sense – they exist as moral and object lessons for the girls, to show them how to be good at a time when they were thinking of themselves (Horwell). Nevertheless, the Hummels as they appear in both mediums play the same part, and have the same effect on the March sisters as a whole. The March parents are extremely religious, with the father actually being a chaplain in the army, and it is their attempts to instil certain virtues and attributes in their daughters (as seen in chapter fourteen, when Jo warns Laurie of her mother’s view of billiard saloons and those who frequent them (Alcott 175)) which inform their interactions with the Hummels. Beth keeps up the visits to the poor immigrant family when her mother is away, and that directly leads to her contracting scarlet fever, which later leads to her decline and death.
Half an hour after, Jo went to “Mother’s closet” for something, and there found little Beth sitting on the medicine chest, looking very grave, with red eyes and a camphor bottle in her han...