100 things #1: Jo March

[lirazel]

“Wouldn’t it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true, and we could live in them?”
— Jo March, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

source

I have seen the 1994 adaptation of Little Women so often that I can quote the entire thing from start to finish. You may think I’m exaggerating, but for once I’m not. I went to see it with my grandmother in the theater the Christmas it came out, when I was almost 9 years old. I practically wore it out on VHS. My daddy says that when he used to call home when I was little and ask me what I was doing, I would say, “Watching Leeetle Weeeeman” (my accent as a child was something to behold, I tell you what). I read the book a couple of times as well and enjoyed it, but the movie was what crawled inside me and stayed. It’s still one of my favorites.

And what I loved most about the movie was Jo. Jo is awkward and, as she herself says, always says the wrong thing. She loves her sisters to the depths of her soul, but she can also be petty and mean to them. She wants things so deeply, but she isn’t always sure what those things are. She has a temper that gets the better of her, but she appreciates the patience and self-control of her sisters and mother. She has big dreams, but she works hard to make them happen. She’s capable of big sacrifices for those she loves (like when she sells her hair to pay for Marmee’s train ticket), but she is just as capable of being shallow (like when she’s crying later and Beth thinks she’s thinking about their father away at war, but she’s really mourning her hair). She’s a tangle of contradictions and flaws and real virtues. And I related to her instinctively, often in ways I wouldn’t be really aware of until I grew up a little.

Well, of course Aunt March prefers Amy over me. Why shouldn't she? I'm ugly and awkward and I always say the wrong things. I fly around throwing away perfectly good marriage proposals. I love our home, but I'm just so fitful and I can't stand being here! I'm sorry, I'm sorry Marmee. There's just something really wrong with me. I want to change, but I - I can't. And I just know I'll never fit in anywhere.

Jo’s eagerness often overtakes her good sense. Boy, do I ever relate to that. I have a sort of visceral connection with characters who just want things so desperately and are completely incapable of hiding that. I saw a lot of that in Jo, just as I saw it—and still see it—in myself.

Her words about never fitting in anywhere stuck in my brain and have never quite left. I wasn’t terribly ostracized growing up, but I was constantly aware of being different and often felt loneliness in a way that ached. Part of that was real—I really did like books more than people, and I loved the school parts of school but wasn’t interested in the socializing parts (I distinctly remember often reading during lunch), and while I was friendly with a lot of people I didn’t ever feel like they liked me as much as I liked them (still a problem for me). A bigger part wasn’t unique to me—everyone feels different sometimes because everyone is different and I absolutely believe that loneliness is part of the human condition. Some people, though, are more aware of this than others, and I was always very, very aware of it. As a little girl, I couldn’t see that I wasn’t the only one feeling that way, because when you’re that young, you can’t often see past yourself. You think your pain and your loneliness is unique. It isn’t, but it feels that way, and hearing other people voice the same thing can provide real balm for your soul. I needed to hear Jo voice that for me, because I couldn’t do it myself. I’m thankful that I grew up to the point where I can recognize that everyone out there feels the same way sometimes, but as a little girl, it was sometimes enough that I knew that Jo did.

It wasn’t until I hit college, though, that I started to understand Jo’s fitfulness, how she couldn’t stand being in a place she loved. That’s when my clinical depression showed up for the first time (though there was lots of foreshadowing in my anxiety disorder when I was 10, but that’s another story), and I really started to feel that fitfulness, that restlessness that wanted to move but also dreaded being around people, that made me want to simultaneously run and run and run to the end of the world and also curl up in bed and never leave. Obviously that wasn’t the only thing depression did to me, but it was a part of that experience (and still is, in many of my depressive episodes), and I found that Jo had already been there before and vocalized that feeling for me.

Don't be such a beetle! I could never love anyone as I love my sisters.

This is a movie I watch with my little sister. We pop it in fairly often, and though most of the time we don’t watch it all the way through anymore (last time we watched it, she fell asleep before Beth even got sick for the first time), we still have these moments of bonding over it. It’s a part of our childhood we can revisit together, and that is so precious to me. We are very, very different people (she’s a mixture of Meg and Amy, I think), but we share this love and nostalgic affection for this movie. Watching it together seems like such a sisterly thing to me.

And sisters are the point of the movie, of course. It’s about these four girls, growing up, and their relationship is the heart of everything. One thing I love is that it really highlights the importance of their bond without sugarcoating it. Amy and Jo pick at each other almost constantly, and Amy does a terrible, terrible thing when she burns Jo’s manuscript. It takes Jo a while (and a near-death experience) to forgive her, which feels very realistic to me. Speaking of realism, the many ways in which Jo and Meg don’t understand each other because of their very different personalities and their very different ways of looking at the world—that feels so real. They have different priorities, just like my sister and I do, and who knows? Maybe seeing Jo and Meg’s relationship helped me begin to understand that while my sister is completely different than I am, that she’s not wrong.

But I want to do something different! I don't know what it is yet, but I'm on the watch for it.

I didn’t always know that I wanted to be a writer. I did know that I wanted to do something big, even if I had no idea what it was. I flirted with the idea of being a missionary when I was very young, I spent a big block of time absolutely sure I was going to be an artist, I even wanted to be an Egyptologist for a number of years. The writing came later, but long before that, I knew I wanted something like the lives the characters I loved got to live.

Late at night my mind would come alive with voices and stories and friends as dear to me as any in the real world. I gave myself up to it, longing for transformation.

When I was a little girl, I never much thought about writers. Books were so intensely real and important to me, that while I knew intellectually that they were written by an actual person, that knowledge seemed irrelevant. I thought of books as existing on their own, with their own souls almost, and the name on the front cover only mattered if I wanted to find another book I might enjoy that also had that same name on the cover. It wasn’t until I stumbled into writing fanfiction at about the age of fourteen that I actually internalized the reality that someone out there sat down and thought of each word on each page of every book I ever loved and wrote it down and got paid for it. That was when I figured out that I wanted to write for the rest of my life.

But I was a writer long before that, I just didn’t know it. Like Jo, my mind came alive, especially at night, with voices and stories and friends as dear to me as any in the real world. Many of them were friends that other people had invented, and this series is going to explore many of them. Some of them were friends I made up myself. Either way, hearing Jo say those words on screen was a reassurance that I wasn’t alone, that other people did the same thing. Especially when you’re young and trying to figure out who you are and where you belong in the world, knowing you aren’t alone can be the most important thing in the world.

Marmee: Oh, Jo. Jo, you have so many extraordinary gifts; how can you expect to lead an ordinary life? You're ready to go out and - and find a good use for your talent. Tho' I don't know what I shall do without my Jo. Go, and embrace your liberty. And see what wonderful things come of it.

I entirely blame the fact that I grew up desperate to one day go to Europe on Jo March. She wanted it so bad, and how could I watch this character I love want something so badly and not want it myself? I attained that goal when I studied abroad in Vienna during college, and I think I partly have Jo March to thank for that experience. I’m certain that she’s the one who planted the idea in my mind, and now that I’ve realized how much I love to travel and what it means to me, I’m more thankful to her than ever.

Will we never all be together again?

In his review of the movie, Roger Ebert says that “the film is true to Alcott's story about how all of life seems to stretch ahead of us when we're young, and how, through a series of choices, we choose and narrow our destiny.” I think about that line a lot when I think about the fact that I’m an adult now. I don’t feel like an adult most of the time. I don’t really feel any different than I did at 16, and I didn’t feel different then than I did at 12. I’m still me. And yet, life has kept happening, sometimes in ways that are a little terrifying to think about.

I hate change. I am really, really bad with dealing with it. The idea of something being gone forever, of things being unable to return, is terrifying to me. And yet I’m now at the point in my life where so many things are gone for good and won’t ever return. And that’s going to keep happening, and I get really scared sometimes. I crave security, and there just isn’t much of it in this world. When I think about that certainty, I sometimes think of Jo asking if her family will ever be together again. What she’s really asking is—are these things that were precious to me gone forever? I really love Winona Ryder’s delivery there: she sounds wistful and yet resigned. She sounds braver than I feel. I don’t think I’m a brave person at all. But Jo is. It’s probably cheesy to say that she inspires me to at least try to be braver, but she does.

Professor Bhaer: Jo. Such a little name for... such a person.

Jo March was one of the first characters who vocalized for me details of my own life experience, aspects of my own personality and things I had noticed about the world but hadn’t known how to express. That was immeasurably valuable to me, especially as a little girl, and the fact that she still has things to say about my life now that I’m an adult is such a great gift. I wouldn’t be who I am without her.