But I also feel the pull of narrative, of images on the screen, of watching an artist build a world and inviting others to enter. So I feel conflicted about the criticisms of “Little Women.” I understand the fatigue of watching a prestigious film about white women being claimed as a cultural watershed for women everywhere. Indeed, I felt an immense power, as if I’d found a way to read the book that only I was clever enough to discover. When I made my claim, I did not feel as if I were betraying my blackness. Francie - with her fierce and sometimes unknowable mother, in her allegiance to her block, in her ability, borne of necessity, to create better worlds for herself inside her mind - all of these read as markers of black girlhood to me. I took that murky definition and decided it must mean Francie was black like me. I read the chapters that told the history of their arrival in America over and over, and seized on the phrase “black Irish.” I grew up in a predominantly Irish suburb of Boston - I knew that people used the phrase to describe Irish people with darker hair and darker skin. “Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. I read it so many times, I knew the opening lines by heart. I read “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” three times a summer, every summer, from ages 12 to 16. Maybe I am too comfortable, too unquestioning of performing these calculations over and over again. I should, perhaps, admit my own bias here. This is most evident in the shot of the March family walking to a poorer neighbor’s house to give away their Christmas dinner and passing the rest of the town leaving morning church services - an institution to which they do not belong. This adaptation is alive with curiosity and is intent on reminding us of the context in which the March sisters lived. There is a fine line between a piece of art that acknowledges it is about the worldview of a very specific person - in the case of “Little Women,” that of a white girl in Massachusetts, raised in an abolitionist family during the Civil War - and a piece of art that declares that this worldview is the only one that matters and is fatally incurious about all others. The film I saw was one that explored how the small decisions made in childhood affect a whole life’s trajectory how gender, birth order, social expectations can raise or dampen a spirit and the prices paid for rallying against all those constraints to declare a self.Įven with the imbalance of empathy, the criticism of the film’s perceived unbearable whiteness seemed unfair to me. I saw “Little Women” the day after Christmas, with my two older sisters and my 12-year-old niece. Is empathy really empathy if it’s generally asked to flow in only one direction? Under those circumstances, empathy looks less like identifying with the other and more like emotional hegemony. Isn’t reading fiction an exercise in empathy? But empathy for whom, and for what higher purpose, always complicates this supposedly benevolent action. So when we as black girls read most books, we have to will ourselves into the bodies on the page, with a selectivity and an internal edit that white readers of the same canon do not necessarily have to exercise. No one had ever written about them except as props.” As Toni Morrison noted after she wrote her own contribution to the canon, “The Bluest Eye ,” “that subject - those most vulnerable, most undescried, not taken seriously little black girls - had never existed seriously in literature. We do not appear in many of the books deemed classic literature. If you are a black girl reading the American canon, you often have to perform a special equation. I do not know many who ask, for example, “Are you a Lauren?” in reference to “Parable of the Sower.” But they do not possess the assumption of lingua franca that “Little Women” is given in cultural conversations. In the decades since “Little Women” was published, children’s novels with black girl heroines have also been published - “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” “The Bluest Eye” the works of Virginia Hamilton and Octavia Butler. It’s that assumption of universality that irks when you are a black girl reader. Every girl, it is decided, must be in some part a Jo, a Meg, a Beth or an Amy. Its characters are lovingly interpreted as archetypes. “Little Women” is a book that its devotees tend to stress as a defining description of American girlhood. And a perhaps kinder one that more aptly described the derision, “Little Women is white women’s Black Panther.
#LITTLE WOMEN TOO MOVIE#
Another pondered why this movie was being made now. “I don’t care about ‘Little Women’ ,” read one. About a week before “Little Women” premiered in December, the tweets started rolling across my timeline.
0 kommentar(er)
