Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 classic Little Women begins with an adult Jo March entering the smoke-filled, man-filled offices of a New York publisher in hopes of selling a story. “If the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end,” the editor decrees. “Or dead, either way.”
Alcott herself never married and thought that Jo “should have remained a literary spinster”. But after publication of the first volume of the book, covering the March sisters’ childhood, Alcott was flooded with letters from fans demanding to know whom the little women had married. In rebellion, Alcott “made a funny match” for Jo, forgoing the obvious choice of Laurie in favour of Professor Bhaer, a middle-aged German, “neither rich nor great, young nor handsome, in no respect what is called fascinating, imposing, or brilliant”.
Gerwig reworks this disappointing ending by conflating Jo’s fate with Alcott’s. In the film, we see Jo negotiating the terms of a book deal. She agrees to marrying off her heroine to get the book published but won’t sell her off cheaply, negotiating the percentage of royalties and keeping the copyright, as Alcott did. Gerwig could be charged with cakeism: she simultaneously serves up a feminist outcome while feeding the audience a romantic resolution, and this time with a hunky husband.
Romance plots “are, evidently, some of the deep, shared structures of our culture”, wrote critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis in Writing Beyond the Ending (1985). The convention of “married or dead” female characters persisted in fiction well beyond the Victorian era. But if the romance fantasy was long doled out to women as a compensation for powerlessness elsewhere, contemporary writers are increasingly turning the marriage plot on its head.
In Such a Fun Age, one of this year’s hottest debuts, Kiley Reid pokes fun at wokeness and provides a nuanced consideration of race. She also subverts expectations of the young woman’s coming-of-age novel by giving her main character, Emira, different priorities. “Emira’s dealing with a very ‘humans in late capitalism’ period of her 20s, which leaves her questioning everything,” Reid told the New York Times. “Am I holding my friends back? Should I be living in a different apartment? How do I make more money? What do I want to do?” Boy problems – refreshingly – don’t even make the shortlist. Emira’s reaction to a racist incident at an upscale supermarket is self-inquiry rather than revenge: “More than the racial bias, the night at Market Depot came back to her with a nauseating surge and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don’t have a real job.” As the interracial love subplot plays out, it’s a job with benefits, rather than a good marriage, that proves to be the holy grail.
Reid joins other present-day novelists relegating romance to the back seat. In Writers & Lovers, to be published in May, Lily King addresses subjects including grief, the creative process, and the anxieties of student debt and short-term employment. There’s a love triangle as well, but here, too, the ultimate aim is financial freedom. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) includes sporadic communication with a sadistic ex-boyfriend before the protagonist shuns social interaction entirely as she cocoons herself in her drug-induced hibernation. In last year’s Supper Club by Lara Williams, the main character finds herself torn between the comfort of life with her caring boyfriend and “a cavernous sense of yearning” for something else.
With her modern twists on 19th-century novels, Sally Rooney has emerged as a leading writer of millennial romance. Normal People, which won the Costa novel award and is being adapted for TV, is a story of first love. Marianne, an outcast at her high school, secretly dates the popular Connell, but is humiliated when he invites someone else to a formal dance. The tables are turned when they arrive at Trinity College, Dublin, where Marianne holds court while Connell struggles socially. Their on-again, off-again relationship is left unresolved, but it’s suggested that when Connell goes abroad to study, they will go their separate ways. Marianne gets to experience the healing force of unconditional love from a good guy without giving up her independence.
In her debut novel Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019), Taffy Brodesser-Akner reverses the roles of the matrimonial malaise tales typical of John Updike and Philip Roth by making the woman the one to flee. Rachel Fleishman is a successful talent agent and, as such, financially independent. Here everybody’s unhappy in their midlife muddle: the narrator, Libby, is in a loving marriage but finds herself bored; their friend Seth, the eternal bachelor, is lonely without more meaningful connections. Rachel believes not only that women can’t have it all, but that her daughter won’t have it any better: “It was like those T-shirts all my daughter’s friends were wearing to school now, the ones that said THE FUTURE IS FEMALE in big block letters … the only reason it’s tolerated is that everyone knows it’s just a lie we tell to girls to make their marginalisation bearable.”
As we live through a real-life princess quitting the castle, even Disney, which built a multibillion-dollar princess franchise from damsels in distress, is rethinking its messaging. Frozen II opens with a flashback of sisters Elsa and Anna as children, playing with ice figurines. Anna acts out a love scene with a prince: “Who cares about danger when there’s love?” she says, making the toys kiss. “Uh, Anna, blurgh … Kissing won’t save the forest,” Elsa responds. Throughout the film, with their kingdom and her sister in peril, Anna indeed has bigger fish to fry than kissing. It’s Kristoff who belts out a ballad and spends much of his time bumbling as he tries to propose to her. And refreshingly, rather than ending with a wedding scene, we get Anna sending Elsa an invitation to play charades.
Movies and books matter. Scripting goals for female characters beyond pining for a prince and waiting for rescue encourages an increased sense of agency, especially in younger readers, and viewers. I hope the girls munching popcorn next to me during the screenings of Little Women and Frozen II weren’t just scoping out their next fancy dress costumes, but imagining the mark they’ll make on the world •
